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110 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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somat ◴[] No.44355587[source]
The tricky thing about justifying an X terminal is that it requires a nice graphics system and probably a nice cpu to drive that graphics system as well, so really the only thing you don't need is storage. basically it is hard to save money because you are buying most of a nice computer anyway.
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1. PaulDavisThe1st ◴[] No.44357624[source]
1995, I work 3 days a week for Amazon but need some sort of computing device at home when I'm parenting my kid. I have a nice SPARCstation in the office, and money is actually a little tight, so I'm not getting one of those for home use. I'd already used NCD X Terminals in my previous job at UWashington CS&E, so we got one of them, connected it via a 96k modem (the NCD's could do this, using SLIP), and I was able to dial into "the office" and have a relatively normal X session in my home.

OTOH ... we had already started using the first Linux system at amazon by that time, and a few years later, when a 25MHz 486 running Redhat became the first computer I actually owned (I resisted for that long!), the idea of an X Terminal seemed a bit quaint and limited.