Jetstar unveils thin client, BYO laptop vision

[Bob Larter]

"Thin clients" in the 80's were simply remote TTY devices. They were only
capable of displaying text - not a GUI.

Not so. There were several GUI capable thin clients for Unix for example.

 

[Frank Slootweg]

Anything? We're talking about 'thin' clients here, not workstations.

"Anything" is indeed an overstatement, but there is no reason to
*exclude* 'workstations' as possible thin clients, i.e. not all
workstations are/can_be thin clients, but some are/can_be. We're getting
warmer!

While there might have been a miniscule number of them in places like MIT or
DEC labs in the VERY late 80s, X-Terminals certainly weren't even close to
common until the 90s.
Agreed.


A Sun3 could NEVER be called 'thin' unless you ran over it with a steam
roller.

We were talking about *computers*, so what has Sun got to do with
anything!?

Trivia question: Which company created the first Sun OS?

 

[terryc]

X Windows isn't a thin client. An X Terminal is but they weren't
generally available until the 90s.

The word "generally" is not a qualifier I believe was initially used.
Some of us used "X terminals" in the 70's.

 

[keithr]

Anything? We're talking about 'thin' clients here, not workstations.

While there might have been a miniscule number of them in places like MIT or
DEC labs in the VERY late 80s, X-Terminals certainly weren't even close to
common until the 90s.

The ANU had a bunch of them in the mid 1980s

A Sun3 could NEVER be called 'thin' unless you ran over it with a steam
roller.

Physically definitely not, logically they were thin.

 

[Jasen Betts]

Anything? We're talking about 'thin' clients here, not workstations.

While there might have been a miniscule number of them in places like MIT or
DEC labs in the VERY late 80s, X-Terminals certainly weren't even close to
common until the 90s.


A Sun3 could NEVER be called 'thin' unless you ran over it with a steam
roller.

at 1U these sun3's were thinner than most desktop machines.

but the term thin client was popularised two years after my first
encounter with theses diskless X machines.

 

[terryc]

LOL.
So you powered them on and waited (at least) 4 years for something to
connect to?

No, actually in my case I had to write the frigging program.

 

[keithr]

And this discussion was about physically thin clients - Hence the discussion
starting off with Wyse terminals.

Thin clients are so called because they are physically thin? ROFL

Are you injecting some weird humour or do you really believe that?

 

[Gary R. Schmidt]

Kwyjibo wrote:
[SNIP]

X Windows isn't a thin client. An X Terminal is but they weren't generally
available until the 90s.

I must have been hallucinating about all those Labtam X terminals I
worked on back in the 1980s - M68K- and then i860- and i960- based.

There's no way that Kwyj could be wrong about anything, could there?
(Maybe it's started channelling Rod Speed these days - who could believe
that someone *else* could be so wrong at such length!)

Cheers,
Gary B-)

 

[Andy]

So the user can just slip in a CD or a DVD and load a new application of
their choosing at will?

Only an extremely poorly managed corporate environment would have
regular users with permissions to install 'new applications of their
choosing', regardless of the use of thin/fat clients.

 

[Frank Slootweg]

See the earlier references to Wyse - We are talking about single purpose,
physically thin clients.
Workstations don't even come close.

No, 'we' weren't talking about single purpose (only) and certainly not
about physically thin clients, and neither were *you* (If you think
otherwise then cite.)! So please don't dream up stuff as you go along.

Dunno. If it wasn't Sun it probably would have been AT&T.

It was HP. Sun OS was a micro-kernel which ran HP's UNIX
implementation (HP-UX) on the HP 9000 Series 500. (It also ran another
OS.)

 

[Frank Slootweg]

[Non-response noted.]

Here's the first message in this thread that you replied to, you useless
bullshit artist.

"Wyse? I thought that they were dead years ago, Fujitsu bought them.
Maybe someone has done a Lazarus on the name. The thin clients look like
we are heading back into the days of green screen terminals, just with
some fancy graphics built in."

Nope! That was *part* of the message, not all of it (Free clue:
"[...]".). *And* I responded to *another* part. *And* I responded *in
context*. You might want to try that sometime!

So now you've added 'convenient' silent snipping to ad Hominem
attacks. What's next?

What did Wyse make their name manufacturing? Workstations?
Strawman.


Stop trying to rewrite history then, dickhead.

Don't you hate those damned reflecting display screen!?

PKB. QED. HTH. HAND. EOD. NK.