4 ms·

Everything old is new again: Terminals in 2011

6 points by gavingmiller 16y ago

sophacles 16y ago
I really hate that these types of articles always bust out this weird dichotomy of "centralized" vs "decentralized" arguing. I don't know why this is, perhaps there are historical reasons for doing this, since at one point it was a big divide -- really defining the types of available arguments. Now however, it is 2011, and the world is a bit different. Mostly, the centralized/decentralized divide is now a big mushy space called "networking". Those of us who have grown up with the idea of both PCs and Servers and Mainframes, don't look upon them as religions so much anymore. There are very good reasons for each of these architectures, and they map to different problems. Further there are many times solutions from centralized or decentralized space work equally well in terms of technology, but not so well in terms budget. For example, where I work we all carry around MacBooks as our primary working computers. We recently have needed to do a bunch of development using .Net on windows. We decided to buy a very powerful server box, (24 cores, 140GB Ram etc) to be the main computer for windows dev. This allows several developers to remote in, and run VS2010, is pretty fast, and cost about 1/3 of the equivalent in new resources for each dev. It works for this case. Conversely we decided to buy lots of cheap little machines for our test lab, and cluster them as needed, rather than a single big iron machine using VMS, because the flexibility was more important than cost. These decisions never involved a tech flamewar, just a "what things will actually solve the problem, what tradeoffs exist, and how does the budget work best with them". tl;dr -- sometimes terminals are a great solution for the cost, don't exclude them based on an old, mostly irrelevant anymore, religion.
- zdw 16y ago
  Conversely we decided to buy lots of cheap little machines for our test lab, and cluster them as needed, rather than a single big iron machine using VMS, because the flexibility was more important than cost. I'd imagine finding an Alpha or VAX to run VMS also contributed to this decision.
  - sophacles 16y ago
    :) I meant VMs (as in Virtual Machines).
gavingmiller 16y ago
I think one of the important items to pick up from the article is that Userful has packaged up a technology - that any one of us is familiar with - and created a consumer product from it. Much like Dropbox has done, the average consumer is very interested in a solution that abstracts away their problems and "Just works" No doubt there are a ton of opportunities in those spaces.
hernan7 16y ago
Well, it has a mouse, so it's more like an X terminal than a plain old serial terminal like a VT220. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal -- notice the mouse; working on one of these was "almost" indistinguishable from having a display/kbd/mouse connected directly to the server. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220 -- no graphics or mouse here, just CURSES. Back in the 90's X terminals were considered perfectly adequate for most desktop computing tasks (short of CAD, I guess) provided the server was powerful enough. I guess the proliferation of cheap Intel/ Windows boxes was what did them in.

6 points by gavingmiller 16y ago

I really hate that these types of articles always bust out this weird dichotomy of "centralized" vs "decentralized" arguing. I don't know why this is, perhaps there are historical reasons for doing this, since at one point it was a big divide -- really defining the types of available arguments. Now however, it is 2011, and the world is a bit different. Mostly, the centralized/decentralized divide is now a big mushy space called "networking". Those of us who have grown up with the idea of both PCs and Servers and Mainframes, don't look upon them as religions so much anymore. There are very good reasons for each of these architectures, and they map to different problems. Further there are many times solutions from centralized or decentralized space work equally well in terms of technology, but not so well in terms budget. For example, where I work we all carry around MacBooks as our primary working computers. We recently have needed to do a bunch of development using .Net on windows. We decided to buy a very powerful server box, (24 cores, 140GB Ram etc) to be the main computer for windows dev. This allows several developers to remote in, and run VS2010, is pretty fast, and cost about 1/3 of the equivalent in new resources for each dev. It works for this case. Conversely we decided to buy lots of cheap little machines for our test lab, and cluster them as needed, rather than a single big iron machine using VMS, because the flexibility was more important than cost. These decisions never involved a tech flamewar, just a "what things will actually solve the problem, what tradeoffs exist, and how does the budget work best with them". tl;dr -- sometimes terminals are a great solution for the cost, don't exclude them based on an old, mostly irrelevant anymore, religion.

zdw 16y ago
Conversely we decided to buy lots of cheap little machines for our test lab, and cluster them as needed, rather than a single big iron machine using VMS, because the flexibility was more important than cost. I'd imagine finding an Alpha or VAX to run VMS also contributed to this decision.
- sophacles 16y ago
  :) I meant VMs (as in Virtual Machines).

gavingmiller 16y ago

I think one of the important items to pick up from the article is that Userful has packaged up a technology - that any one of us is familiar with - and created a consumer product from it. Much like Dropbox has done, the average consumer is very interested in a solution that abstracts away their problems and "Just works" No doubt there are a ton of opportunities in those spaces.

hernan7 16y ago

Well, it has a mouse, so it's more like an X terminal than a plain old serial terminal like a VT220. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal -- notice the mouse; working on one of these was "almost" indistinguishable from having a display/kbd/mouse connected directly to the server. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220 -- no graphics or mouse here, just CURSES. Back in the 90's X terminals were considered perfectly adequate for most desktop computing tasks (short of CAD, I guess) provided the server was powerful enough. I guess the proliferation of cheap Intel/ Windows boxes was what did them in.