[HN Gopher] Smart terminals: Personal computing's true origin? (...
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Smart terminals: Personal computing's true origin? (2023)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 36 points
Date : 2024-02-13 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com)
| Aloha wrote:
| As someone with some knowledge of the BLIT and other intelligent
| terminals, I've often thought about them as an alternative path
| of evolution in computing. One we've kinda worked our way back to
| in a way - with much fatter clients.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > I've often thought about them as an alternative path of
| evolution in computing.
|
| I never saw one in the flesh, but DEC's Gigi is a very
| interesting one - AFAIK, it's both a VT-100-like terminal (with
| Tek and ReGIS graphics) and a computer with BASIC. The
| computing world would be very different today if all personal
| computers had modems and could be terminals as well as
| computers.
|
| > we've kinda worked our way back to
|
| That's true. The first time I saw an HTML form I immediately
| thought of the 3270 block oriented terminals shooting screens
| back and forth rather than one character at a time.
| codeflo wrote:
| > The computing world would be very different today if all
| personal computers had modems and could be terminals as well
| as computers.
|
| Doesn't every smart phone have a modem and act both as a
| computer (running local software) and as a terminal (in the
| modern form of the web browser)?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Yes, but all that happened after the web, and it didn't
| happen (at least not immediately) to desktops and laptops.
| Now every computer is connected to a large global network,
| but when the Apple IIs roamed the Earth, every computer
| (except the extremely well funded ones) was an island.
| kjs3 wrote:
| We had large numbers of AT&T 3b2 + BLIT (well...5620s and 630s)
| setups in college. They were really fun to work on. Bit-mapped,
| portrait view display when most folks had 80x24 text, a real
| GUI (called 'layers') with a mouse, windows and apps and such.
| Even games. Especially nice was the fact that you could put a
| BLIT on the end of a 19.2k or higher serial line and get real
| work done.
|
| There was a similar-but-different terminal from BBN called the
| BitGraph that was almost as nifty. Way more obscure these days.
|
| To me, though, the pinnacle of 'traditional' serial terminals
| will always be the Tektronix 4100 and 4200 series. Graphics,
| color, very rich command set, a trackpad style 'mouse', even a
| graphics tablet. Good times.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > a real GUI (called 'layers') with a mouse, windows and apps
| and such
|
| There is a Blit emulator in the Apple App Store, but I never
| found enough of the server side of Layers to be able to use
| it for anything (other than booting and looking awesome).
|
| I am fascinated by these less traveled roads of computing.
|
| > the pinnacle of 'traditional' serial terminals will always
| be the Tektronix 4100 and 4200 series
|
| Those were very impressive machines. But sooooo expensive...
| Aloha wrote:
| https://loomcom.com/3b2/
|
| Emulate it to your hearts content.
| kjs3 wrote:
| _but I never found enough of the server side of Layers_
|
| It should be in many of the various SVR3 releases and most
| of the SVR4s. I know those can be run in virtual machines
| of various kinds these days, and the distros are not
| exactly hard to find. There's even a guy working on a 3B2
| emulator which obviously should have it. Might have to find
| that emulator and crank up the old Dell SVR4 and see if
| they'll talk.
|
| _I am fascinated by these less traveled roads of
| computing._
|
| You might check out the MGR windowing system. It's an
| 'inspired by' doppelganger of layers. Ran on SunOS and some
| other old Unixen, as well as the Atari ST and others I
| forget. Source code is out there.
|
| _Those were very impressive machines. But sooooo
| expensive..._
|
| Still are on both counts.
| Aloha wrote:
| Yeah, a working DMD emulator has been worked out, and
| also a distribution with layers.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Sort of? I don't disagree but this shift of locus for compute
| from the datacenter to the edge and back again is kind of like
| a pulsing heartbeat if you stick around long enough.
|
| Mainframe -> form based terminals
|
| Minicomputers (multiple servers) -> Terminals with flexibility
| in their formatting
|
| Personal computers (combined terminal + compute)
|
| Server farms (lots of servers) -> Thin X servers / Citrix style
| clients
|
| Server farms (lots of servers) -> Web Browser (software
| implementation of a terminal with very flexible formatting)
|
| Surprisingly, I wrote about it in BYTE Magazine back in the day
| (like in 1984) about how "intelligence" (which was code for
| programmability) in remote nodes lead to a separation of
| computation and presentation. There is a tremendous bandwidth
| advantage if you do it this way (sending text is less bandwidth
| than sending bitmaps or compressed video streams).
| dajt wrote:
| Exactly! I've been around long enough to experience that
| series of events from top to bottom.
|
| That's the weird thing about this business. There's always a
| new generation saying 'this is dumb, we should do it
| differently' and things bounce back and forth.
|
| As you say, smart terminals are one reason why an old
| mainframe could support so many users with so few resources -
| all that display and input processing offloaded in a very
| distributed fashion.
|
| Web and Electron apps make me weep for what was.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Because terminals above a certain level of sophistication were
| small computers running dedicated terminal firmware didn't help
| them - it was unavoidable they'd end up not being cheaper than
| desktop computers running terminal software.
| Animats wrote:
| There's also a history of something called shared-logic word
| processors, which was a few dumb terminals hard wired to a
| minicomputer with a printer and disk. The original IBM PC
| borrowed its monitor from IBM's shared-logic word processor.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Apple 1 is a good representative of transitional period of mid
| 1970s, as it is a computer _and_ a dumb terminal on the same
| board.
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