Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!rws From: rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals Message-ID: <8901311908.AA04200@EXPIRE.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 31 Jan 89 19:08:05 GMT References: Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 16 The X terminal business is still in its infancy. There's room for a fair amount of improvement and innovation. But, like any piece of hardware, X terminals will be appropriate only to some specific market. ASCII terminals don't do lots of things, but there are millions of them out there. I believe X terminals will be reasonable for lots of people. If you try to increase the capabilities of an X terminal too far too fast (e.g. putting a disk on it), there won't be a sufficient price difference between it and a workstation and people will buy a workstation instead. Most X terminals being built today are using some mechanism (ftp, tftp, NFS) for access to non-resident fonts, and punt fonts when no longer in use. Improving this in terms of caching (parts of) fonts needs to be done, as well as regularizing the access method. There is work underway in the X Consortium in this area. Some thinking about paging over the net has also gone on.