Terminals

I remember the shock I got when I was first introduced to the 5620, having just moved to AT&T from Xerox :-) My new boss was surprised to see my lack of enthusiasm, since I was "one of the lucky ones" to have a 5620 instead of the HP terminals (2620?) everyone else was using.. I'd just come from an environment where all development was done on D-machines with 21" monitors, suddenly I'm looking at a strange A4ish sized terminal which was hooked up to an Amdahl mainframe along with the rest of the site... whoa, culture shock! The mouse was the oddest thing I ever saw, a huge red half-globe thing with three huge clicky switches right on the rim, very uncomfortable to use. I was sad to see it go when a year or so later they upgraded a bunch of terminals to 630s with orange screens... orange on black never really worked for me :-) By the time I left AT&T they'd belatedly joined the desktop revolution and had equipped everyone with Sun IPXs, but the old centralised mainframe mentality never quite went away... all our home directories were remote mounted from a central server :-) Happy daze! -al