

Everything old is new again: Terminals in 2011 - gavingmiller
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2011/02/25/comptuter-sharing-alternative-classrooms.html

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sophacles
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
_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
:) I meant VMs (as in Virtual Machines).

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hernan7
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> \-- 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> \-- 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.

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gavingmiller
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.

