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Blast from the past: Facit A2400 terminal

The year is (roughly) 1989, and we have a small office with some Unix computers and a handful of Facit A2400 terminals connected to them. What we love most about these terminals is they are positive terminals with black text on a white background. We “grew up” with green on black and, later at Nixdorf Computer AG, with amber on black. Young readers might be surprised we used to get printed manuals with our terminals (and computers); don’t forget, the Web didn’t exist then, and “download the man

The Novelty of the Arpanet

If you run an image search for the word “ARPANET,” you will find lots of maps showing how the government research network expanded steadily across the country throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s. I’m guessing that most people reading or hearing about the ARPANET for the first time encounter one of these maps. Obviously, the maps are interesting—it’s hard to believe that there were once so few networked computers that their locations could all be conveyed with what is really pretty lo-fi car

The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals

For a while, X terminals were a reasonably popular way to give people comparatively inexpensive X desktops. These X terminals relied on X's network transparency so that only the X server had to run on the X terminal itself, with all of your terminal windows and other programs running on a server somewhere and just displaying on the X terminal. For a long time, using a big server and a lab full of X terminals was significantly cheaper than setting up a lab full of actual workstations (until inexp