Hacker News Reader

I have a soft spot for those short-lived X-terminals as well. The golden age of computing.

Colors are great for web browsing, don't get me wrong. Just not near my code!

I contracted at Nortel in the mid 1990's. In my cube I somehow acquired a Sun Sparcstation 20 that nobody was using, and found an NCD black-and-white (or was that one grayscale?) X terminal on a shelf somewhere, collecting dust. I found an image for it somewhere, and set it up to TFTP boot from the SS20 (which was running Red Hat Linux) to a login prompt (XDM). It was a nice little setup.

I bet it was. Well done.

A couple of years ago I was just about to throw out all my O'Reilly X Window/Motif books from 20 years ago and when I landed a contract to update a K&R C based Motif system running on 32-bit Solaris connected to - of course - Sybase. It felt like I travelled back in time.

Old code never dies.

I have X/Window/Motif O'Reilly's from more than 20 years ago which are still shrink wrapped together. I've just been carrying them from place to place.

Must be worth a fortune by now ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com