Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!bu-cs!encore!bzs
From: bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals
Message-ID: <5007@xenna.Encore.COM>
Date: 1 Mar 89 05:42:30 GMT
References: <8902272209.AA07843@devnull.sun.com>
Organization: Encore Computer Corp, Marlboro, MA
Lines: 63
In-reply-to: dshr@SUN.COM's message of 27 Feb 89 18:50:04 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.15 of Tue Jun  9 1987 on xenna (berkeley-unix)


>-	All I am trying to do is to point that the claims
>
>	X terminals are cheaper than workstations
>	X terminals run the same applications as workstations
>
>	need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.  I am not
>	saying X terminals are a bad idea - in the right context
>	they can be cost-effective - but that the right contexts
>	to employ them in are somewhat restricted.

Fine, then we agree 100% on this.

>-	You have been taken in by the first of the claims.  You
>	keep contrasting $2K terminals with $10K workstations,
>	ignoring the cost of the resources needed to run the clients.
>	Does Encore give its machines away free with a box of X
>	terminals?

I don't understand, the clients run on the Encore (or whatever,
Sequent, there, equal time :-) whether the display is an X terminal or
a workstation or whatever.

Are you saying it costs *more* to run the clients against X terminals
than against a workstation? If not then explain, I'm missing your
point.

Otherwise it all seems equal to me and my comparison is valid, clients
is clients, who cares what's being used for a display from the point
of view of that machine?

>When someone is killed because a critical X client crashes with an
>Alloc error,  it won't do us a lot of good to say "yes,  we knew about
>this,  but we couldn't be bothered to deal with the problem" like we
>had to for the worm.  The fact that the problem is hard isn't an excuse
>for not trying to solve it.

This is getting ludicrous, yes, people have to evaluate the hardware
and software they're specifying. No one is making the claims you're
straw-man'ing against, there is no cover-up (or shouldn't be.)

Do you know about a certain three-letter vendor who sold their
token-ring against ethernet in hospitals by telling the hospital
administrators that ethernet is unpredicatable by its very CSMA/CD
nature? And when a packet is lost in a collision a patient !might die!
in the delay, no joke, a guy on unix-wizards from a major research
hospital was begging for people to supply him with counter-arguments.

Sound familiar? Sound comfortable?

>And don't say "everyone knows that you shouldn't build critical things
>in X".  I've already heard about air traffic control work in X.

What happens when most any machine runs out of swap space? Or disk?
Or process slots? Or...Why is this X terminal limitation so unique?

Computers and their peripheral equipment have resource limits which
should be carefully taken into account when designing critical
applications environments.

There, I said it, now everyone knows...

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||