OK, Wyse guy: So how do YOU think 'boosting' legacy tech is a winner? Nexenta, the provider of hardware-independent software-defined storage with a ZFS disk-based stack, has gained 5,000-plus customers by enabling them to get EMC/NetApp-class storage functionality at much lower prices by not paying the mainstream vendors' lock-in hardware tax. It's a good game, as far as it goes, but the world …
My WY50 terminals attached to serial ports (early 1980s technology) still allow me to fix a tits-up GUI on current server hardware. Not that I think the GUI is necessary to begin with for this kinda thing, you understand ... but try to explain that to the kids in marketing.
Well, you DID ask ...
A serial terminal? My Psion 5MX does that too and is eminently more portable than a CRT-in-a-case-with-a-loose-keyboard that is a Wyse 50, or a Digital VT220, or any of their contemporaries. Try climbing a ladder with one of those to fix a misbehaving piece of network tech (which has lost its serial-to-IP connection as part of that) somewhere in the bowels of a production plant, and see how you manage. Even a laptop with a real serial port, or a qualified USB-serial or PCcard-serial adapter would be a better choice.
In 1985 (nearly a decade and a half before your 5MX), I used ComDesign statmuxes and pre-strung serial cables, sometimes/often with Anderson-Jacobson dial-back modem-pairs, to reconfigure sodding bits of misbehaving hardware both on-campus and all over the world. From the Sun Workstation on my desk in my clean, cool office. I still do, as a matter of fact, on my personal distributed network. The Sun is now an aging HP laptop running Slackware, but little else has changed.
Climbing a ladder in this situation is ... well, to put it mildly, fool hardy. A proper data center would never require such a bit of physical exertion for text access to a server with a titsup GUI. Me, I handle it from my desk.
Butt in the saddle time. That's the only way to learn ...
Please note, Stoneshop, I have a couple of alternate access methods in my personal command&control system ... leased lines, "The Internet" (whatever that is), dial-back modems, and hardwired.
I think I'm kinda ready for what what can happen. YMMV.
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