manufacturers [...] who said "You know, if we
just drop a disk drive
and some more memory into this thing, we'd have a PC".
When I moved from a terminal to a PC connected as a
terminal, I
thought I'd gone to heaven. I don't miss terminals at all.
I do. In some respects, at least.
Terminals are smaller. They are quieter. They suck less power. They
generate less heat. They boot a *hell* of a lot faster - most
terminals are functioning before even aimed-at-embedded SBCs have more
than barely started POST, never mind booted. They're less expensive.
Of course, there are other respects in which terminals fall short.
Most of them can be summarized as "they're less flexible" - for
exmaple, you can't capture output into a file, you can't copy a file
into the input stream, you have limited (in some cases *very* limited)
local editing capability....
But then, sometimes I'll use my Swiss army knife - and sometimes I'll
reach for a real screwdriver. Terminals have a place in my ideal
world, even though computers running terminal emulators do too.
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