Think early 90's computers, and everything required to run a X server well. lots of memory, nice graphics, a nice cpu to move those graphics around. despite being technically thin clients, Dedicated X servers were not cheap.
It is sort of like the anecdote about an early sys-admin who traced down a problem with the new department laser printer locking up for hours to one engineer who had to be told to knock it off when he explained that he was printing nothing, But the printer had, by far, the most powerful CPU in the building so he ported all his simulation programs to postscript and was running them on the printer.
>Think early 90's computers, and everything required to run a X server well. lots of memory, nice graphics, a nice cpu to move those graphics around. despite being technically thin clients, Dedicated X servers were not cheap.
They really didn't have that. Largely Unix workstations running X had a graphics stack that almost entirely software with no or little hardware acceleration. What made them workstations compared to PCs was the large "high" resolution monitors. The DEC lab at my university consisted of DECstation 3100s (16 MHz MIPS R2000 with 16 MB RAM and an 8-bit bitmapped display with no hardware acceleration.) The engineering department had labs with Sun and RS/6000 machines.
Commodity PCs were 386s with 4-8 MB RAM and monitors that would do 640x480 or 800x600 and video cards that would do 8 or 15/16 bpp. A great day was when someone put a linux kernel and XFree86 on a 1.2 MB floppy that could use XDMCP to connect to the DECs or Suns to turn any PC in the PC labs into an X terminal.
As a one-time uni sysadmin back in the day, our EE lab(s) we had students running Matlab on a Sun E3500 with the display going up on a diskless ~10 year old Sun SparStation 5s that we had lying around (originally from the early 1990s).
i have owned kindles for the better part of a decade and purchased books from the store a total of 4 times - the library and friend’s epub collections were far more appealing
