10 Apr
2012
10 Apr
'12
6:25 p.m.
In article <4F84C455.6000303 at gmail.com>,
Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> writes:
For sure, but those big NCD ones always seemed
particularly good.
Yes, I used these at E&S in the early 90s and I particularly liked the
screen *and* the keyboard. I have several you can see here:
<http://computergraphicsmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/wall-18.jpg>
I think I have the X server software stashed around somewhere, but not
on original install media.
Lucky :-) I did have a Tektronix m88k-based X
terminal, but that was
colour and as you say the picture just isn't as sharp (although still a
nice enough little box, which I had booting off my main Linux desktop
machine for a few years). I'm not certain whether I kept it - it may be in
storage overseas still. I know that someone did dig into the firmware on it
and substituted their own ROM code to the point where it'd throw 'hello
world' up on the screen, but I don't know if they ever got any further than
that.
It's a significant piece of software engineering to bring up an X
server at all, much less tune one to run well on these limited
resource boxes. It's much easier to see if you can get the original
distributions running on them. Later X terminals had a mature server
in ROM so that they could boot independently of a network server and
just rely on DHCP and whatnot for hooking themselves into your
network.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 version available for download
<http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>