What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2079

This information is not hard to come by. Why speculate when a simple search would tell you?

The original X Windows was developed by Robert Scheifler from the MIT LCS (Laboratory for Computer Science) group, based on the W windowing system from Stanford (with some key innovations, particularly asynchronous processing of requests), but it was quickly adopted by Project Athena.

X11 (which is what most people today mean by "X Windows") was developed as a joint effort among LCS, Athena, and DEC's Western Software Laboratory. MIT was not the sole source of funding. Enhancements were provided by myriad sources.

Athena was an MIT project to modernize the computing infrastructure at the university, but DEC and IBM were major contributors, supplying funding, equipment, and development. Athena incorporated a lot of experimental or limited-availability hardware and software, such as the IBM ACIS Experimental Display (AED) and the IBM Academic Operating System (AOS) for the PC RT (a port of BSD 4.2 and 4.3).

When I started working for IBM I was part of ACIS, and I worked with people who had done work for Athena.

Kerberos also came out of Athena, along with many other things (not all of which proved popular outside MIT).

Carnegie-Mellon's Andrew project (which produced AFS, among other things) was a similar effort.

X11 has nowhere near the footprint of the GUI component of MS Windows. DIX (device-independent X) is quite clean, and DDX (device-dependent X) is only as heavy as you want to make it for optimization purposes.

--

There are many definitions of what art is, but what I am convinced art is not is self-expression. If I have an experience, it is not important because it is mine. It is important because it's worth writing about for other people, worth sharing with other people. That is what gives it validity. (Auden)