printf, data presentation

[Barry Shein]

From: friedl at vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl)
>In article <9281 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>> Exactly.  That's why I don't support standardization of curses-like
>> interfaces.  It's an idea whose time has gone.
>
>Doug, you are living in a dream world, one full of idealistic fantasy.
>You may like your Blit, but for every one of you, there are at least
>50,000 people with Wyse 50s at their desks.  For the majority of these
>people, a bitmapped interface would be massive overkill.

I agree with Doug, you might be the one in a dream world.

The point is investing the effort (read $$) in redoing the entire
curses package, having it verified and accepted and getting it into
common use takes a lot of time and money. I could stop right here and
say if you're too cheap to buy new terminals why in the world would I
cater to your needs for new software (ie. poverty sucks.) Better to
learn to live with the current dumb terminal technology then wish
(dream?) that someone else will invest that kind of effort.

But the real point is that graphically oriented displays are coming
down in price rapidly in the form of things like X terminals. There's
already at least one brand selling for under $1K, PCs running decent
graphical interfaces to remote systems should be commonplace soon and
a floppy based, 640K, 286 PC is around $1K (ie. enough to run as a
bitmapped-style terminal), all pretty close to dumb terminal prices
and getting closer.

Even very good (eg. 1Kx1K) X terminals are around $2K and I'll happily
predict will approach $1K in a year or so, probably before the curses
rewrite got out the door and into applications. Note that they're
running both serial and ethernet interfaces.

BUT, you ask, why would I throw out all those dumb terminals and
replace them with these? It doesn't cost me anything (other than
maintenance) to just keep my old stuff?!

The answer is tautological but true: Software.

Do you really want to buy *new* dumb terminals as you expand? Do you
doubt that these new terminal users are going to be bringing in a
whole new world of software which exploits these new terminals?

How long will you want to support two incompatible software bases,
buying the latest release of two new (wordprocessors, spreadsheets,
editors, etc) every year and dealing with training and problems on
both systems? When will the economics of that turn around and bite
you?

Put simply, try using an old paper terminal for a while and see how
many needed tools don't even exist anymore or can't be bought (well,
unix is pretty good at this, but only for the most basic chores, it
certainly was frozen on this technology around a decade ago.)

What happened to all the old paper terminals? We all threw them away,
I remember seeing about 100 of them hauled away as junk a couple of
years ago where I worked, perfectly good decwriter II's I would have
killed for in 1978.

I lived thru it with paper->crt's and people said the same sort of
things (heck, I lived thru punch cards -> paper/interactive terminals,
one dept STILL insisted on getting all their data on punch cards for
years because, well, you could FEEL it or something.) I remember
getting my head chopped off once for delivering an application that
required a CRT and wouldn't work on a paper terminal, I think they
called me a dreamer to think every tom, dick and harry would have a
crt, ever. I think Lear Siegler introduced their $795 ADM-3A around
three months later and that was the end of that argument.

Besides, you see, NAIVE users prefer paper terminals because it lets
them look back at what they did and re-enter things if necessary, only
a sophisticated programmer-type can deal with things running off the
screen all the time (anyone remember that argument? Ah, the naive
user, s/he always wins the battle...)

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||