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A comment on The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals. Parent comment

Re:The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals by justin66 on Monday June 23, 2025 @12:18PM (#44357307)
A cursory look at Byte Magazine from September of 1987: a 233MB Priam hard drive for $2888 dollars. That's with a crappy RLL interface rather than SCSI.

If you think about a lab full of computers doing relatively simple Unix work, and how much money would be saved by just having a single drive (and all other things being equal, which they of course aren't), it's not trivial.

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Re:The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals by toast0 on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @02:33AM (#44363393)
Plenty of Unix systems could be booted from NFS. Assuming no local storage, and that you need X, the question is, what's the difference in cost and capability between a X terminal and a diskless unix station that runs X? You've also got to consider costs to run a NFS server for your diskless unix stations vs costs to run a desktop server that backs all the X sessions.
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Re:The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals by justin66 on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @02:17PM (#44369094)
X terminals predate usable, widespread NFS implementations by a few years, I think. I wonder if the migration away from X terminals might be as simple as that.
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