[arethuza]

X (the Window System not the thing that was Twitter) explicitly allowed a remote machine to send rendering commands over a network to the local machine? (I'm avoiding using the term "server" as X has this round the other way - from the users perspective the server is local and the client can be remote).

Sun's NeWS also allowed something similar - but with a large amount of programmability using PostScript.

[IgorPartola]

Sure but that was with the idea that everything happens synchronously. TeamViewer also renders the UI remotely. Any system where the client actually does any state management and not just pixel/character rendering does not use this. While the X system did allow this, real world systems did not use any of these remote rendering commands besides “render pixels”.