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From: twolf@homxb.ATT.COM (T.WOLF)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals
Message-ID: <3074@homxb.ATT.COM>
Date: 27 Feb 89 19:00:38 GMT
References: <8902262128.AA04910@devnull.sun.com> <21032@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Organization: AT&T BL Holmdel NJ USA
Lines: 29

In article <21032@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, mujica@ra.cs.ucla.edu (S. Mujica) writes:
> 
...deleted stuff...
> The argumentation in David Rosenthal's message is based on the fact
> that X servers may grow very large when complex applications are run.
> 
> He also says that X terminals defeat the purpose of X because their
> limited memory size does not allow to run complex clients that demand
> large amounts of space in the server.

I guess I'm second-guessing the original author, but I don'tr recall the
him being of that opinion at all.  He simply asserted that companies
providing X-terminals want the public to believe that these terminals can
do everything a diskless workstation can.
...deleted stuff...

> Isn't David Rosenthal pointing to a basic limitation in the design of
> X rather than in the X terminal concept?

I agree.  But what design doesn't suffer limitations imposed by the environ-
ment?  Memory contraints on the server side were probably chosen as the lesser
of two evils (the other being large network-transmission costs of these data
structures.)

-- 
Tom Wolf
Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ			E-mail:  twolf@homxb.att.com

(My employer doesn't know about these and other incriminating remarks)