In article <e1d20d630701181229q14dcadfcx4b2514eaa352a0 at mail.gmail.com>,
"William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes:
Keep in mind, however, that the artifacts that he did
save are the
better examples from the group - it was not picked willy-nilly. [...]
True and on a more personal example, I generally skip over the Wyse
and Boundless terminals because they are all visually
indistinguishable from one another. They are from that period in the
development of the terminal when they were primarily used in a legacy
mode or in a cost-conscious mode. In either case, there is no
incentive to making a grander terminal, but instead the incentive is
all for minimizing the cost of production. So they all tend to be
highly integrated circuit boards that fit entirely in the CRT
enclosure with the enclosure not being much larger than the tube
itself. The keyboards have also become standardized in a consistent
layout between manufacturers at that time, so there's no room to
innovate there. The terminal had become a commodity by then and it
was all about manufacturing cost and margin and not functionality.
The X terminal took up the role of the innovative product for a while,
but even there it has become a commodity product now -- either as an X
terminal or as a Windows thinclient.
But still, someone had to be paying enough attention to identify that
stoves *should* be put aside somewhere as a document of the evolving
technological landscape. At the time, even for the good items, I'm
sure people looked at him weird like "dude, why are you collecting
stoves?".
--
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