(n.) A windowed system often mistakenly called X Windows. A specification for device-independent windowing operations on bitmap display devices, it was originally developed by MIT’s Project Athena. The server is the computer, or the X terminal, and the screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the server program, and the clients are application programs. Clients may run on the same compter as the server or on a different computer, and they communicate over Ethernet via TCP/IP protocols. X clients run on what is often considered a file server, but in X, the screen, the keyboard, and the mouse are served out to the applications. X is used on many Unix systems.
X Window System
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