One thing to note with X11's design, having a server and client, there was nothing requiring both to be on the same machine. You could run an X11 client on your local machine, ssh into a remote machine and use its X11 server.
Lets say you are home and can ssh into a work server. You could run Firefox on the work machine, using it's network and have the visual parts show up on your home computer.
This was very much a Unix, shared resource style design. Servers and thin clients. Put all your horse power in the big machine and connect using your crappy low power system to it.
Maybe they became self aware and could no longer live with themselves knowing their family history.