X Window System <operating system, graphics> A specification for device-independent windowing operations on bitmap display devices, developed initially by MIT's Project Athena and now a de facto standard supported by the X Consortium. X was named after an earlier window system called "W". It is a window system called "X", not a system called "X Windows". X uses a {client-server} protocol, the {X protocol}. The server is the computer or X terminal with the screen, keyboard, mouse and server program and the clients are application programs. Clients may run on the same computer as the server or on a different computer, communicating over Ethernet via TCP/IP protocols. This is confusing because X clients often run on what people usually think of as their server (e.g. a file server) but in X, it is the screen and keyboard etc. which is being "served out" to the applications. X is used on many {Unix} systems. It has also been described as over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated. X11R6 (version 11, release 6) was released in May 1994. {Home (http://www.x.org/)}. See also {Andrew project}, {PEX}, {VNC}, {XFree86}. {Usenet} newsgroups: {news:comp.windows.x}, {news:comp.x}, [news:comp.windows.x.apps], [news:comp.windows.x.intrinsics], [news:comp.windows.x.announce], [news:comp.sources.x], [news:comp.windows.x.motif], [news:comp.windows.x.pex]. (1999-04-02)