Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

On 03/06/2025 12:49, Rich wrote:

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 03/06/2025 10:31, Nuno Silva wrote:

For terminals (the hardware devices, it seems we may need to get another
word for terminals, as it might otherwise be seen as nitpicking...),
another issue is likely to be that, even if it somehow can support utf8,
it might be limited in how much glyphs it can support at once. (I mean,
not by an incomplete font, but because it has a limit in how much glyphs
any font can have.)
>

Are any terminals still being made?

 Actual commercial ones -- doubtful.  Unless there is some esoteric
maker supplying all the banks running COBOL mainframes with 3250
clones.
 

Wasnt the whole point of the IBM PC to be able to do a 3270 etc at lower cost ?

I mean if I wanted to do the VT220 or wyse 50 thing I'd get a raspberry
PI and a LCD monitor and run linux on it and build one out of software.

 And further blurring the line between what is a hardware terminal vs. a
virtual terminal.
'

Well exactly. 'Glass teletypes' versus 'smart terminals' become 'PCs'...
Names of things are only metadata ponting  to the 'thing in itself'.
So many arguments arise from people confusing descriptions with the things they describe.
Read your Kant

And absolutely use the full amount of ROM space to fill it with fonts.

 Indeed, a R-PI terminal could have a glyph for every unicode code point
that was defined as of the last time you did a software update on the
OS.
 

Lord knows how many fonts I have on this desktop.  Once upon a time they chewed RAM and slowed things down. To the extent you needed font managers to enable a subset only for specific jobs.
Now just load em up is spare gigabyte somewhere...

Last time I saw a dedicated terminal in a bank, hooked up to some remote
mainframe, it was a PC running some custom code, anyway.

 This has been the way for a very long time.  The actual single function
"terminal" hardware is not likely a very sellable item anymore.
 

Probly would be if someone made an LCD style Wyse 50 or VT220

There'll be terminals with at least some graphical capability, but
that's only usable if it's fast enough.
>
I think mine supports changing fonts, but unless the customization is
done with a cartridge(?) on the back side, I suspect loading the
customization will not be very fast.

>
It really is simply too obsolete for me.
>
I replaced serial terminals with a plasma screen laptop running DOS back
in the 90s sometime...
>
Or winodows3  equipped with a emulator or telnet client

 In my case, never had one.  "Terminal" access to whatever needed to see
a "terminal" on my end was always via a general purpose computer
running a software terminal emulator.  Originally Qmodem and a dialup
modem to access the college computers, later Linux and Minicom or
telnet or ssh.

You don't go back far enough...:-)
Many a job was sat in front of a VT200 or wyse 50 connected via a serial line to a PDP or VAX or even a SCO Unix box.
The cost of a SCO UNIX on a 386  with a multiport serial card and 50 Wyse terminals was unbelievably low.
--
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
—Soren Kierkegaard