Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us (2017)

Re:Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us (2017) by kjs3 on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @11:11PM (#24206794)

Yes...this is one of the key innovations that X had that probably isn't so useful now. Efficient use of memory was critical. In the mid-1990s, low end Sun's could actually ship as a supported config with 24-bit video and as little as 20MB of memory (16M system ram + 4M vsimm) like the the SX/CG14 in the SS20. There were 24-bit cards for earlier, mc68k Suns that could run in even less, but were more for rendering and of questionable utility for interactive use.

Another thing this efficiency allowed was the X Terminal. It was something akin the a serial terminal but running X, modest processor and memory, diskless (some had floppies for file transfer), usually running a couple of built-in local clients (xclock, etc), and costing far less than a full workstation. Most of them I recall being either monochrome or 8-bit color, but around this time I had an NCD X Terminal with 24-bit graphics, a MIPS processor and 16M ram + 8M vram, and network (streaming) audio for about a fraction the cost of an SGI Indy. Nice machine.

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Re:Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us (2017) by cbm-vic-20 on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @10:45AM (#24210898)

Some of our university computer labs in the mid-90s were set up this way: a room full of X Terminals that you could use to connect to the big Alpha machines in the datacenter, or the Sun machines if you needed the software that ran on them, etc. When Linux with X came around, it was awesome to be able to dial into the modem bank and get connected to these machines from home.

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Re:Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us (2017) by kjs3 on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @03:31PM (#24215112)

I deployed a couple of thousand NCD xterms at a Very Large airline backed by a cluster of very large Sun machines running a customer service application. Would have been late 90s. Very successful once the network performance issues were wrung out. Good times.

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Re:Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us (2017) by icedchai on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @10:36AM (#24210788)

I remember working in a lab full of X terminals. They were NCDs, now that I recall. They all ran off of DEC Alpha or DECstation servers. That environment was pretty snappy.

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