MeeGo, Zero To VT320 In Seventeen Seconds

muirhead writes "Installing MeeGo on an Eee PC 1000 netbook is quick, slick, and easy. The user interface is colorful and stylish with many quirky animations. MeeGo's features are easy to discover and it is fast and responsive. Underneath it all though there is still just a netbook. That means it's got a display screen that has no significant weight behind it. That means typing on an undersized keyboard that has no life. All of these undesirable features can, however, be fixed by adding 9kg (~20lbs) of VT320 video terminal."

Comments

We laugh at your puny VT320

[Animats]

That's not hooking a classic terminal to a netbook. This is hooking a classic terminal to a netbook. (More pictures.)

Re:Sigh, I just threw out my VT320

[dcavanaugh]

Thinking about your post makes me feel even older. When I was in college the "new" terminals were VT-100. The lab was open 24 hours a day because there weren't enough terminals to go around. For those who knew where to look, there were a few VT-52s hiding in relative obscurity.

Granted, the VAX had less power than a Mac mini, but it also had reliability that modern systems can't match.

Re:Sigh, I just threw out my VT320

[MichaelSmith]

Granted, the VAX had less power than a Mac mini, but it also had reliability that modern systems can't match.

In my previous job we ran PDP 11/84s and 11/83s, VAX 11/750s and later various alphas. The PDPs running RSX11M had the greatest feeling of stability I have seen. You could get back to a system after a year and find it in exactly the same state you had left it. The architecture of RSX probably helped. Dynamic memory is discouraged. Many applications are effectively built into the kernel.

Re:Terminals on an Apple IIGS

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

There's not many dumb terminals around any more for sure unless you're using an IBM Mainframe I guess. I suspect they still use 3270's.

I guess I'm going to show my age here, but to me a VT320 is very far from a dumb terminal, having used a real glass tty (i.e. terminal that couldn't do e.g. cursor addressing, or even backspace).

And the 3270 in particular is about as smart as a terminal ever got. The terminal itself did the input field text editing before shipping the whole screen input back to the mainframe. Even though there aren't many actual terminals around you'll still see them emulated on PCs in quite a number of applications.