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From: mujica@ra.cs.ucla.edu (S. Mujica)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals
Message-ID: <21082@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 28 Feb 89 17:07:18 GMT
References: <8902262128.AA04910@devnull.sun.com> <21032@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <3074@homxb.ATT.COM>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: mujica@ra.cs.ucla.edu (S. Mujica)
Organization: Computer Science Dept. UCLA
Lines: 41
In-reply-to: twolf@homxb.ATT.COM (T.WOLF)

In article <3074@homxb.ATT.COM>, twolf@homxb (T.WOLF) writes:
>In article <21032@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, mujica@ra.cs.ucla.edu (S. Mujica) writes:
...
>> 
>> 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...
>

Read the following piece of text extracted from Rosenthal's original
article:

"...
	But the whole idea of X was to get away from simple terminal-type
	interfaces and make a real operating system look more like
	the "computer you already know how to use".  If I can't in
	practice run the clients that were the raison d'etre for X,
	I think I'm entitled to feel cheated.
..."

>> 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.)
>

Right! I essentially quoted Rosenthal's message.  I just wanted to
point out that the importat part of his article was the exposure of a
problem in X, not the attack on X terminals and X terminal companies.

Sergio Mujica    mujica@cs.ucla.edu
Computer Science Department, UCLA