Kids these days don't know the annoyances^W joy of configuring X11 so that startx would work
(just kidding, things work more reliably today and that's how it should be, but someone had to experiment with it first)
If it helps, I didn't actually exist at the time
(I'm younger than the GGP poster here, but I was enough of a nerd in primary school that I got into Linux at about the time that distro installers' XFree86 autoconfigurators got you most of the way but still had to have a manual modeline configuration option in the advanced settings...)
Mandatory xkcd comic: https://www.xkcd.com/963/