donated computers lab setup

Dave Ihnat dihnat at dminet.com
Tue Jan 2 18:26:04 UTC 2007


On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 11:18:31AM -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> There are some X terminal packages that will run on an XT. ...

More appropriately, there are X server packages that run under DOS.
(And before someone pops up with a correction, everything through Windows
3.x was just DOS with some eye candy.)

BUT:

> ... If I remember correctly, most of the X terminal programs ran on
> top of DOS.

Oh, but you so do NOT want to go there.  Since DOS doesn't support TCP/IP,
there was a horrible rats-nest of third-party TCP/IP suites that went with
getting X to work.  Some were better than others, but all were commercial
(read: proprietary and liensed), and almost all were cranky and fragile
by today's standards.  This would not be a good thing to do to end users.

And, as has been pointed out, all modern Unix/Linux versions require
at least a 386.  (I briefly used a version of Unix called "Venix" many
moons ago--it ran on a 286 box, but had absolutely no memory protection.
You don't want to know what that was like.)
--
	Dave Ihnat
	President, DMINET Consulting, Inc.
	dihnat at dminet.com




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