David Stone's Blog

I'm open to suggestions for a subtitle here! (Really!)

RE: Windows is completely missing the TextMode boat...

With all this talk of shiny Avalon, I'm surprised that more people aren't mentioning "text-mode" applications.  I assume we all realize that there are literally millions of Windows machines from 95 to XP that exist only to allow more than one Telnet/ProcommPlus/Terminal window at a time, so end-users can interact with remote systems.
…
I’m just saying that my Tab,Tab,Tab,Enter will beat your Click,Tab,Alt-F,O,Click,Double-Click, more often than not and I will take the Pepsi Challenge otherwise. :)

Am I nuts to think that Windows is missing the text-mode boat?

[ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog]

I think that’s where Monad comes into play. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with it. I’ve only briefly played around with it, but even the surface features are amazing. Once people start writing really in-depth cmdlets, I think it’ll be the biggest advancement in command line history. If you haven’t looked at it yet, I strongly recommend you hop on over to BetaPlace and download the tech preview. Then start watching some of the Channel 9 videos that they have over there with the Monad team. Some really amazing info there.
Posted: Dec 01 2004, 11:07 AM by David Stone | with 2 comment(s)

Comments

Shog9 said:

Maybe i'm missing the point of Scott's post... or misunderstanding Monad... but it sounds to me like what he's saying is that a good deal of Windows PCs are used as little more than dumb terminals.

Example: the call center i once worked at had every desk stocked with a nice, big-screen NT machine. They used NT so that they could lock them down such that the only apps that could be run were the terminal emulator, and Outlook. We ran several copies of the terminal emulator to connect to various RPG apps, and Outlook for email. Apart from the ability to task switch, not much was required of the OS.

A factory i worked at for a time had crappy Win95 machines in the shipping dept. and offices running telnet (or maybe hyperterminal, i forget) to connect to some Unix inventory app on the company's mainframe. Task switching wasn't even required here!

There are gobs of these apps out there still, and although some are being augmented by web front-ends and/or client apps + screen scrapers, there'll probably still be a fair number of off-the-shelf PCs being used as terminals around.

Apart from perhaps writing a better terminal app (which sounds like what Scott is getting at), i can't see where MS really has an interest here, apart from continuing to come pre-installed on the cheapest PCs...
# December 1, 2004 3:15 PM

TrackBack said:

^_^,Pretty Good!
# April 10, 2005 6:26 AM
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