Terminals

From: Alan Pearson <Alan.Pearson_at_cramersystems.com>
Date: Mon Aug 13 02:57:41 2001

> AT&T carpet-bombed Georgia Tech with 3b2s when I was there (~1985), so I
> used them quite a bit at the time. Actually really nice when used with
the
> 5620 BLIT graphics terminals. I'd love to have one of those.

I remember the shock I got when I was first introduced to the 5620, having
just moved to AT&T from Xerox :-) My new boss was surprised to see my lack
of enthusiasm, since I was "one of the lucky ones" to have a 5620 instead of
the HP terminals (2620?) everyone else was using.. I'd just come from an
environment where all development was done on D-machines with 21" monitors,
suddenly I'm looking at a strange A4ish sized terminal which was hooked up
to an Amdahl mainframe along with the rest of the site... whoa, culture
shock! The mouse was the oddest thing I ever saw, a huge red half-globe
thing with three huge clicky switches right on the rim, very uncomfortable
to use.

I was sad to see it go when a year or so later they upgraded a bunch of
terminals to 630s with orange screens... orange on black never really worked
for me :-)

By the time I left AT&T they'd belatedly joined the desktop revolution and
had equipped everyone with Sun IPXs, but the old centralised mainframe
mentality never quite went away... all our home directories were remote
mounted from a central server :-)

Happy daze!
-al
Received on Mon Aug 13 2001 - 02:57:41 BST

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