s later, Microsoft Windows running on a much faster 80386 based PC still felt slower.The Amiga was also the first platform to make major use of emulation of other operating systems. Emulators for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh became quite widely used, often in an attempt to make the Amiga more useful for business purposes (it didn't have a lot of business software). The technology of emulation went on to become very important in the next decade.The X Window System - UNIX gets a GUIThe X Window System (known as just X, or sometimes [incorrectly] as X Windows), first appeared in the mid 1980's running on DEC VAX based UNIX workstations. X was developed at MIT (with support from Digital) as part of MIT's Project Athena distributed workstation environment. Many of the core ideas of X (as well as the X name) were derived from an earlier Stanford windowing system named W. Other ideas came from Sun's SunView environment which ran on the 68000 based Sun-3 workstations. The early versions of X were developed primarily by Robert Scheifler, Ron Newman and Jim Gettys. X went on to become the basic graphics system of all the RISC based UNIX workstations.Aside from providing UNIX with a graphical user interface, X's main contribution to the computing world was the idea of displaying an application remotely over a network (ie: running an application on one machine but displaying its user interface on another, much like telnet already provided for command line UNIX users). The implementation was a client-server approach, where an X window system server ran on the displaying machine, and the client programs communicated with it using a network protocol. The X server and its client programs could be running on the same machine, or on different machines, it didn't matter.X had an unusual career. In somewhat of an odd decision, its designers decided that X should only provide mechanism, not policy. So X did not provide any particular look an feel, but...
