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From: thp@westhawk.UUCP ("Timothy H Panton.")
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Re: A Thought on X Terminals
Message-ID: <8902270942.AA04882@westhawk.uucp>
Date: 27 Feb 89 09:42:08 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 45

At the risk of repeating what other (more illustrious) posters have
said, it is worth pointing out that we (software developers) are not
the 'big' market for Xterminals, just as we are not the 'big' market
for ascii terminals. As I understand it Visual et al are planning to 
sell mostly to system integrators, who may be selling an accounts 
package with built in graphics, or a medical database with graphical
fields in the records. 

The thing about these applications is that their users 'live' in them
so to estimate the amount of server resource one simply(?) has to get
into the most complex part of the system and see how much that uses.

The fly in the ointment is that these people will leave the system 
running for days or weeks, so any leaks will cripple (or even kill)
the application.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through an Xapplication of this sort and on
a reasonably complex screen the server seems to peak at about 2Mb 
(X11R3 - sun 3/50) so I'd guess that a 2Mb Xterminal (code in rom)
will probably be about right. ( It isn't clear to me that this is the
way to go, it depends on where you want the client to be run)

The place where X terminal vendors may trip up, is by saying

> David Rosenthal <dshr@sun.com> writes:
>-	They are cheaper than workstations.
>-	They run the same X clients as workstations.

particularly to Universities and research establisments, who are really
developers and as such should only have one for testing purposes, not
daily use.

So in summary: 
	I don't want one on my desk, but I can see where they might be
useful.

Tim 

Ps: Allowing the server to swap just postpones the problem. :->

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|Tim Panton, Westhawk Ltd.       (Bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.)|
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