Bob Scheifler
Robert W. Scheifler (b. 1954) is an MIT-trained computer scientist who led the X Window System from its 1984 launch with Jim Gettys through the 1996 closure of the MIT X Consortium, then became a principal architect of Sun's Jini distributed services framework.
Robert William Scheifler (born 24 June 1954, Kirkwood, Missouri) is an American computer scientist best known for leading the X Window System from its 1984 inception at MIT until the MIT X Consortium closed in 1996. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT, where he worked at the Laboratory for Computer Science. Scheifler started X with Jim Gettys of Project Athena in 1984; he had originally wanted a usable display for debugging the Argus distributed programming system, and Athena needed a portable window system that could span the project's mix of DEC, IBM, and Sun workstations. He announced X publicly on 19 June 1984, designed the asynchronous, network-transparent client-server protocol that became X11 in 1987, and articulated the project's guiding principle: mechanism not policy, meaning the protocol should provide primitives and leave look-and-feel to clients. He coauthored the canonical 1986 paper 'The X Window System' with Gettys and the 1992 reference book of the same name. After the X Consortium dissolved, Scheifler moved to Sun Microsystems, where he became one of the principal architects of Jini, a Java-based distributed services framework. He is credited with raising the floor for windowing systems across the entire Unix market and for showing that an open, vendor-neutral graphics standard could outlast the companies that funded it.