That is what I call serial terminals and they are older.
You had better define what you mean by a thin terminal. Most to me are just mini-computers, with very small boxes. You might also want to define gui?
Most people might think it came after computer mice, but there have been a pile of other devices before that which did similar jobs suck as track balls, joysticks and digitizer tablets that interacted with a gui.
Considering the discussion started out by talking about Wyse terminals, what do you think I meant?
Same as most other people mean when they refer to a GUI - A *graphical* user interface. i.e. A user interface that is interacted with using graphic elements - not just text.
Who mentioned *how* you interact with it?
-- Kwyj.
Oh well, graphical terminals have been around since the 70s. So, if a wyse termial is a thin terminal, then they have been around since then.
a
then.
The X protocol was around in the 80's, Wyse were one of a number of vendors of X displays. At about the same time SUN had some sort of postscript-based protocol and clients kicking around.
IBM had graphical display terminals around for some years in their SNA environment.
I remember using over a 2400bps dial-up a lightweight GUI protocol contrived I think by AT&T in the early 90's that had been around a while before I found it.
I'm sure there were others.
A big factor in centralised vs decentralised IT architectures is always the data volume vs network cost trade-off. Network is getting relatively cheap again so centralisation is again being revisited.
Terry
Sigh! When I want to hear things "bullshit", "stupid" and getting
*called* "stupid", just 'taking' to Mr. Speed is more than enough. I don't need another source of abuse, thank you very much.And yes, there is such a thin client and you already know the brand, so happy Googling!
Damn! All this time I was using a (graphical) windowing system and a mouse/trackball and *now* you tell me that I was only imagining things! I'm crushed!
Anything that ran "X window system".
It wasn't until feb 1990 that I actually got my hands on a thin client though. (It was a re-purposed sun3) the display was huge (21"?) and had some insane number of pixels 1.5M? black and white. (mono 1bpp)
Also note that the X Window System was not the only, and AFAIK/IIRC, not the first window system, at least not the first commercially available window system.
[...]
X Windows.
HTH!
--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\\|/ \\|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------
Not so. There were several GUI capable thin clients for Unix for example.
--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\\|/ \\|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------
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.
-- Kwyj.
X Windows isn't a thin client. An X Terminal is but they weren't generally available until the 90s.
You didn't.
-- Kwyj.
"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!Agreed.
We were talking about *computers*, so what has Sun got to do with anything!? :-)
Trivia question: Which company created the first Sun OS?
The word "generally" is not a qualifier I believe was initially used. Some of us used "X terminals" in the 70's.
The ANU had a bunch of them in the mid 1980s
Physically definitely not, logically they were thin.
And this discussion was about physically thin clients - Hence the discussion starting off with Wyse terminals.
-- Kwyj.
See the earlier references to Wyse - We are talking about single purpose, physically thin clients. Workstations don't even come close.
Dunno. If it wasn't Sun it probably would have been AT&T.
-- Kwyj.
LOL. So you powered them on and waited (at least) 4 years for something to connect to?
-- Kwyj.
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.
No, actually in my case I had to write the frigging program.
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