18 May
2005
18 May
'05
8:38 p.m.
On Wed, 18 May 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
Interesting way to skew it, but it 'breaks'
somewhat with certain older
microprocessor based systems. My Altos 586, for instance, has 5 serial
ports all designed to host a user on a dumb terminal. But it has an
8086 processor. So it's explicitly a multiuser machine, but with a
single chip micro.
An interesting 'dividing line' that I like to use is 'does a keyboard
plug into it?' Is it primarily designed as a single-user workstation,
with keyboard and display attached?
Good idea, but that one also has plenty of exceptions. Machines such as
Morrow, Northstar, etc. required an external terminal, in spite of being
single user.