I just wanna say that "we read the video BIOS code and then run it under an x86 emulator" sounds like some truly heroic effort by a bunch of engineers and I'm glad they did the work. I hope the people involved are proud of it.
I agree it was an engineering marvel, IMO only less impressive than the CPU implemented in JPEG instructions for Pegasus.
And then PCI became ubiquitous and it was much cheaper to plug a PC card into a machine than buy an overpriced one from Sun or DEC or whatever, and people were starting to run Linux or *BSD instead of the vendor OS, and suddenly there was an incentive to be able to run graphics card x86 init code even on other CPU architectures.
I ended up stealing the concept and the code to make Ubuntu's usplash boot splash app work on 64-bit, which is an entirely different story.
It didn’t. The X Windows system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System) started at MIT and is from 1984, PowerPC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC) from 1992.