Often times, when I am researching something about computers or coding that has been around a very long while, I will come across a document on a university website that tells me more about that thing than any Wikipedia page or archive ever could.

I recently found such a document inside Princeton University's astrophysics department: "An Introduction to the X Window System," written by Robert Lupton.

X Window System, which turned 40 years old earlier this week, was something you had to know how to use to work with space-facing instruments back in the early 1980s, when VT100s, VAX-11/750s, and Sun Microsystems boxes would share space at college computer labs.

As the member of the AstroPhysical Sciences Department at Princeton who knew the most about computers back then, it fell to Lupton to fix things and take questions.

"Anything that needed graphics code, where you'd want a button or some kind of display for something, that was X... People would probably bug me when I was trying to get work done down in the basement, so I probably wrote this for that reason."

I asked Lupton, whom I caught on the last day before he headed to Chile to help with a very big telescope, how he felt about X, 40 years later.

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