> pcANYWHERE for Windows had this all figured out in the late 80’s. They hooked GDI and transported the API calls wherever possible.

RDP does the same; the early revs were basically GDI over wire. Later versions would have extensions/hax to transport the DirectX stuff (did they just ship framebuffers? I dunno).

Then why is it always compared favorably to X over network, which does exactly the same thing (sending graphics primitives over the network, although these days mostly having to throw over complete frame buffers because everything wants to draw itself)?

1) RDP has better compression.

2) When times changed, RDP adapted, X did not. No one uses those old graphics primitives anymore, and X's network protocol failed to keep up with the new reality of client-side rendering. So now that protocol sucks for remoting GUIs.

Yep. For many applications, RDP on a LAN is literally indistinguishable from a local session. Sadly, nothing I've tried on the Linux desktop comes close to this performance. One of the few areas where the Linux desktop is 15 years behind.

To add to this a bit, another area where the "X ecosystem" didn't keep up is with toolkits. X11 is a very asynchronous protocol, but this is difficult to work with for toolkits so they synchronize most things, making it slow over high latency links (but unnoticeable over low latency links, like UNIX domain sockets on the local host).

That's what RDP does, it's so much better than any 'transferring the image of screen' software like VNC or Teamviewer.

Strange pcAnywhere has fallen by the wayside. That was de-facto in some support jobs I did and you could expect customers to have it for support. What do people use now if pcAnywhere is not there?

I don't do support but I did use it in non-support roles, I just can't imagine the use case nowadays.

I had the pleasure of working with the pcANYWHERE guys on interfacing their product with a product I was working on. They really loved their product and it really showed in the quality of their work. Little details like how you could hit Ctrl-Alt-Del on the remote to reboot the host. So they got fuck you money from Symantec, which I'm sure they enjoyed. But Symantec did not love the product like they did. They could have been a formidable competitor to Citrix, and look how their product line has proliferated.