X and NeWS history
The comment about how X is really just a distributed database system with occasional visual side effects that could be reduced down to 10 or so API calls gives us a glimpse as to what life could have been.It's a shame that all of the X replacements on the horizon also ditch the network transparency part, even though that's been a killer feature for me.  I hate how much of a hack Remote Desktop is on Windows machines.