W was originally developed at Stanford University by Paul Asente and Brian Reid, and originally ran under V. 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.
In 1984, Bob Scheifler of MIT replaced the synchronous protocol of W with an asynchronous alternative and named the result X.
External Links
http://www.linuxhacker.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi/5/2126