Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex

It’s also burned into quite a few old CRTs. :-)

It’s quite nostalgic, as I spent a bunch of time working on early versions of the X Window System. It was definitely classic, as it was the default and it’s what everybody saw, but it would be one of the first things to change if you wanted to use the window system for real work (as opposed to working on the window system itself).

Many displays of the era (late 1980s) were monochrome and interlaced. Each field of alternating scan lines was refreshed at 60Hz, but it meant that the entire image was refreshed only at 30Hz. Each white dot in the root weave pattern had dark above and below it, which resulted in flickering. By contrast, the root stipple of the Xerox Star and SunView (which was copied from the Star, I think) had a pattern of dots that were vertically adjacent. This resulted in less flickering.

The other issue was the X-shaped cursor. It was nice and symmetrical, but as I recall, the hot spot of the cursor (its actual location) was the center of the X. This made it pretty hard to target things accurately. Most systems quickly adopted the upward-left pointing arrow with the hot spot at the tip of the arrow, which makes a lot more sense for targeting.