Terminals

From: Master of all that Sucks <vance_at_ikickass.org>
Date: Mon Aug 13 03:35:10 2001

There's still a lot to be said for mainframes for many of the things that
people are now complaining about smaller systems not doing so well with.
Things like groupware. Ever used groupware on a mainframe? Incredible.

Peace... Sridhar

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Alan Pearson wrote:

> 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 - 03:35:10 BST