[SunRescue] Dumb Term

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, May 21, 2001 at 19:40:54 (-0700), James Lockwood wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Dumb Term
>
> IMO a VT52 is an example of a glass tty.  A DECwriter is a tty.  Something
> like a VT220 is considerably beyond both categories.

A vt52 is *SMART* compared to a real tty (i.e. asr-33 or what have you)!  ;-)

Even a decwriter-III is pretty smart, just one-line-at-a-time....
(Heck it's got an 8080 with lots of ROM code in it!)

I'm pretty sure you're right about the term "smart terminal", but "dumb
terminal" I think came later as a slight on the former to show just how
much smarter such new-fangled devices could be.  Before the really smart
ones came along the not-so-smart ones really were just called "glass
ttys" and indeed there was a company that made a Glasstty(tm) [I've used
one :-)].  By the time the really smart ones came along there weren't
many more glass ttys in use, let alone asr33's and the like!  ;-)

I can't for the life of me remember the name of the first "smart"
terminal I ever encountered.  All I remember was that it had some
enormous amount of memory (256KB, IIRC), an mc68k CPU, a large (19"?)
bit-mapped (and maybe even grey-scale) display.  It came out about the
time as the Sun-1 (1982?).  It had a network interface (might not have
been Ethernet though), and no smarts or disks, just a tiny ROM that
could load a boot image from the network.  A group at the University of
Calgary (where I was attending at the time) built a distributed
graphical computing environment called "JADE" (Just Another Distributed
Environment) using these things as terminals and with a VAX running BSD
as the server host.  The JADE project stole lots of their ideas from
both Smalltalk and the Sun-1 (we had a single Xerox Dolphin worksatation
and a single Sun-1 at UofC at about the same time).

Now nearly 20 years later I run much the same form of software
(i.e. Smalltalk-80) in the guise of Squeak on my Unix server with an NCD
X11 terminal for its display....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>