Joke:

Overheard at a Usenix conference, around that time:

Person A: "... well, I think that Mach is the best example of intellectual fraud that I've seen here this year."

Person B: "What about X Windows?"

Person A: "I said _intellectual_ fraud."

I was never a fan. X was just too far removed from the actual frame buffer to make this video-game writer happy. At. All.

(Probably didn't help that I tried to bring up one of the first versions of X on our Vax, and thought that their design decisions were just jaw-droppingly awful. I don't remember many details -- the frame-buffer layout was pretty strange, though they changed it later -- I just remember shaking my head a lot).