spiffy terminals (was: printf, data presentation)

[Paul De Bra]

In article <815 at ttrde.UUCP> stox at ttrde.UUCP (Kenneth P. Stox) writes:
>In article <9307 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>> aspect of the 630.  Much more relevant are the following:
>
>[deleted a wonderful list of 630 features]
>
>> The 630 has other spiffy features, but these should suffice.  If
>
>First of all, thank you, Doug, for the comments on the 630, however,
>I believe you are missing the most important feature of all, the
>630 is programmable. In other words, if you want to write applications
>that have a portion ( if not all ) of the user interface resident
>in the terminal, you can do so...

Yeah, let's calculate again: a $100.000 computer can serve about 10 people
running a curses (or similar) based application. For 50 people you need
5 times $100.000 of computer and 50 times $300 of terminals, or about
$515.000.
Now, with the application running locally in the terminal (and only talking
to the host in small blocks) you can easily run the 50 users on just the
one $100.000 computer. So all you need is 50 times the $2000 terminal,
or total of $200.000.
So especially for data entry, where the processing of the data is minimal
and presenting the forms and parsing the user-input is the hard part
the 630 (or old 5620 for that matter) is a real win.

Paul.
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