I built labs using NCD and HP xterminals. The world was a different place and today people have different expectations. In the xterminal era they often came w

I built labs using NCD and HP xterminals. The world was a different place and today people have different expectations. In the xterminal era they often came with minimal ram, I think it was 2MB, with options for 4 or 8MB. Mono, greyscale, or 8 bit color were common, with only the highest end terminals (often more than the entry level workstations) offering 24 bit color. Gradients were rare, usually stipples where used. It wasn't uncommon for palettes per window causing flashing when moving to a new window (because they had a different 256 colors). There were recommendations for particular 256 color palettes for compatible with other tabs/windows. These days 24 bit color icons, buttons, live video, multiple animated ads per window, heavy use offscreen memory for scrolling and the like would kill X based terminals. Sadly things moved so quickly that when the X based terminals were new, people where quite excited to use them. However over the 5 years we used them they got noticeably less usable each year. We ended up replacing them with some diskless linux boxes that could run a 24 bit color window manager and browser locally (fast scrolling and window moving) and ran heavy graphical apps remotely over X11, things like Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab. The lab were suddenly much more in demand, and people hugely preferred them over the Mac and Window based labs students had access to. It was a nice mix of offloading servers (by running X11, window manager, and browsers locally) and offloading clients (by running memory intensive software on the server). People seemed to love the low latency keyboard, scrolling, and browsing. Waiting even a few seconds for Mathematica to churn through a notebook of forumulas and rendering was much easier with a responsive desktop. The diskless linux boxes were easy to admin, reliable, and quiet. Basically browsing is hugely more data intensive than the era of X based terminals, even just scrolling animated windows is tough. Things like a full screen video at 4k was not even under consideration. At the same time people's expectations on performance, latency, and visual richness have increased to the point where X based terminals no longer make sense. Even fast 64 core servers with fast 8 core clients networked over switched GigE gives remote X11 a VERY poor experience these days. Try remote firefox over X11 sometime, it's painful.