W was originally developed at Stanford University by Paul Asente and Brian Reid for the V operating system.
In 1983, Paul Asente and Chris Kent ported the system to UNIX on the VS100, giving a copy to those working at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.
[1] In 1984, Bob Scheifler of MIT replaced the synchronous protocol of W with an asynchronous alternative and named the result X.
[2] Since this time, the X window system has gone through many fundamental changes and no longer bears any significant resemblance to W.
This article related to a desktop environment is a stub.