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Except for the green tinge that's pretty much what my setup looks like. Borderless terminals in a tiling window manager with vim and assorted CLI programs. Except of course for iceweasel. Because there's only so far w3m will take you (not very).
I could work on this system. Give me a couple of terminals with vim, and a webbrowser in a different layer (of course that system precedes the web) and I could do 90% of what I'm doing today to get work done.
Without getting too technical, what had to change under the hood and in hardware in order to make this happen?
But the biggest issue was display RAM. To get a decent enough resolution, you need an insane amount of memory, often 50+ kb! And then you need this for every terminal hooked up to the minicomputer/mainframe (don't even think about double-buffering).
This was even an issue for the early text terminals. 72x20 characters was bad enough. Compare this to a line printer, where you just send a character and it stays there, without any backing memory. If I recall correctly, there were some experiments with persistent CRTs, and then of course terminals as we know them that had some memory of their own used to store the sent characters, and after a while even interpret quite elaborate escape sequences (compare sending one "^L" command to sending 80x24 spaces to clear a screen).
Once RAM got cheaper and you had semi-decent monitors, you could build some pretty high resolution monochrome terminals. If you wanted color, too, you had to stay low-res, which is why this was mostly used for gaming, not for actual work. It took quite a while until you could build high-res color workstations, and those were pretty expensive at first.
We live in enchanted times, don't we?
Around the same time, Myron Krueger had the gall to demonstrate pinch-to-zoom[2], nearly 23 years before Apple patented it. So many people piggy-backing off of Cupertino's innovation :/
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo (skip to 4:32)
Ah, early GUIs. For comparison, take a look at Xerox' Cedar and Smalltalk, or Wirth's Lillith and Oberon, all from pretty much the same era. The Lilith systems are often overlooked. They predate the Blit, are programmed in Modula-2, translated to bytecode. Oberon is a bit more well-known, but still not as much as both the language and the OS deserve. Lilith demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc Some…
Except for the green tinge that's pretty much what my setup looks like. Borderless terminals in a tiling window manager with vim and assorted CLI programs. Except of course for iceweasel. Because there's only so far w3m will take you (not very).
Have you looked at elinks for terminal browsing?
Without getting too technical, what had to change under the hood and in hardware in order to make this happen?
The Blit* is a graphics terminal characterized more by the
software it runs than the hardware itself. The hardware is simple
and inexpensive (Figure 1): 256K bytes of memory dual-ported between
an 800x1024x1 bit display and a Motorola MC68000 microprocessor,
with 24K of ROM, an RS-232 interface, a mouse and a keyboard. Unlike
many graphics terminals, it has no special-purpose graphics
hardware; instead, the microprocessor executes all graphical
operations in software. The reasons for and consequences of this
design are discussed elsewhere.
God , here we go again. Yet another example of companies stealing from Apple. This is clearly similar enough to the Macintosh (1984) that I'm surprised Apple didn't sue the hell out of AT&T. They certainly sued the hell out of Microsoft[1], so AT&T must have been lucky. Around the same time, Myron Krueger had the gall to demonstrate pinch-to-zoom[2], nearly 23 years before Apple patented it. So many people piggy-back…
This video is from 1988. Are you saying Apple patented it in 2011?
First of all in 2006, before the iPhone came out, I saw Jeff Han from NYU demoing much more than just pinch-to-zoom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ
And secondly, I thought Apple bought the pinch-to-zoom patent! I don't know much about it, but I am curious about the date.