Ranting on the X protocol

Ranting on the X protocol

On a fast machine - sure.

Hm. IIRC, in the 1990s, the previous poster's 386SX-16 wasn't a »fast machine« by any stretch of the imagination. It probably would have struggled with Windows 95, considering that Windows 95, according to Microsoft, required at least a 386DX processor (i.e., one with a 32-bit external bus).

Windows 95 could be started on a computer with 3Mb of RAM (official minimal requirement was 4Mb) and ran just fine on 8Mb. Linux with X struggled to start xterm on that configuration.

No. In 1994 my computer was a 33 MHz 486DX notebook with 8 megabytes of RAM – not a blazingly fast machine even by the standards of the time but what I could afford. I used that machine to write, among other things, a TeX DVI previewer program (like xdvi but better in some respects, worse in others) based on Tcl/Tk, with the interesting parts written in C of course, but even so. There was no problem running that program in parallel with TeX and Emacs, and in spite of funneling all the user interaction through Tcl it felt just as quick as xdvi, even with things like the xdvi-like magnifier window.

Five years before that, a SPARCstation 1 was considered a nice machine to have, and that ran X just fine, thank you very much. I doubt that the machine I was hacking on at the time had anywhere near 8 megs of RAM.