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?
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!
Not so. There were several GUI capable thin clients for Unix for example.
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.
X Windows isn't a thin client. An X Terminal is but they weren't generally available until the 90s.
You didn't.
"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.
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.
LOL. So you powered them on and waited (at least) 4 years for something to connect to?
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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