that's where I first saw X. at DEC we had DECwindows on ultrix (bsd like unix) and vax/vmx.
motif was the toolkit we developed guis in. and we used UIL to describe the UI, which was data that was read in and could change the look/feel of the widgets or their layout without rebuilding from source.
instead of node:1 for a display it was node::1 for the display (double colon meant decnet instead of that newfangled thing called IP)
In 1992, when I entered the University, I managed to see a variety of Unix workstations in different labs. Our Computer Science labs were exclusively Sun workstations - at the time, SunOS, not even Solaris. We had some DECstations (the ones based on MIPS 3k, not Alpha) in our VLSI lab, running DECwindows on Ultrix. In our Parallel Computing lab, we had some RS/6000 workstations running AIX and Motif (remember that?) There was one term when we had a Real Time computing class, which involved running HP/RT - a real time version of HP/UX on the PA-RISC. Elsewhere, I saw SGI Indigo workstations in the Graphics lab of the CS department.
At that time, I was new to UNIX, so none of these were easy to use, so having X on them didn't really help me. What revolutionized my computer use were the NeXTstations in our computer center. Our computer center had NeXTs, IBM mainframes, Vaxes and Suns. The NeXTs were somewhat painful to use, being diskless workstations, but they drew their data from the Sun servers. It was there that I became a fast typist, and learnt to use quite a few applications, like NewsReader (for USENET), Improv (for spreadsheets) and Frame. After I graduated and NeXT got bought by Apple, I missed them.
The thing I miss about those days is not X, which never impressed me, but the fact that most of those RISC beauties are out to pasture: even having Windows NT on some of them, like Alpha or MIPS, could not save them ;-(