The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals

I had to both administer, and operate on the early X terminals from several vendors they were interesting. Labtam made strides developing boxes using the more novel Intel chips and this may have been what they sold on when they got out of the business and moved to being an ISP in Australia.

I enjoyed using blits and the early dec Ultrix workstations.

Thin X terminals were super cool. But, also really stressed out your Ethernet, and because we didn't have good audio models in X at that time, when multimedia became viable they stopped being as useful. But for a distraction free multiple term, low overhead wm world... super good price performance cost.

I was surprised how a room of top notch 1280x1024 terminals was able to function so well on a shared 10mbps with pretty bad collision detection to boot. X apps of the day were super optimised for local drawing. Even games were super smooth. Toolkits like Motif were all draw calls. By the way back then we thought Motif was bloated lol :)

And then... Came the internet. People suddenly started running NCSA Mosaic in droves that bogged down the single core server. And those browsers started to push lots of bitmap stuff through the pipe to the terminals. Now that was bad, yes. When Netscape came with its image backgrounds and even heavier process people started moving away to the PC rooms :( Because all scroll content needed to be bitstreamed then.

Ps video content at that time wasn't even a thing yet. That came a bit later with realvideo first.

But there was a time when X terminals were more than sufficient, probably for a decade or so.

I remember using xterms to do assignments in modula 2 in about 1993. They were 1 bit screens, I think they were square 1024x1024. Very high resolution for the time.

The NCD-16 had a square 1024x1024 1-bpp screen. I want one so much, but the ones that made it to Ireland and Europe seem to all have been responsibly recycled. :-(

Apple also made a huge and high-res 1-bit display back in those days. They had them at an office that I helped out with computer issues sometimes.