I find this terminal box a cool retro piece of computing,
Ahem,
I think this is not qualified as "retro"
....
Then, I've now only talked about things that happened 20+ years ago, so I guess that, after all, it's my perspective that's twisted. The retro replacement has gone retro in the end!
See, you get to admit it in the end !
I notice as I get older I am having a similar problem for various other things :
1) I lost interest in computers in the late '90s, when the Pentium 2 came out and the race for clock speed went exponential and gaming 3D graphics cards started being a thing and all the rage.
So in the early 2000 I used to say " I don't like modern computers "... but now it's 2022 so a 2002 (say) computer is freaking 20 years old now, so I can't say I don't like it because it's "modern", any more, because it's old now ! So I can't just say I don't like modern computers anymore... now I have to specify what years / period I like.
2) Music : lost interest like computer in the late '90s or so, when TV started going the reality TV route, and "singers" were now coming out of these programs... So in 2000 I could say " I don't like modern singers/artists, it's crap "... but now in 2022 a 2000 artist is fucking old ! So here again I can't say anymore I don't like modern pseudo "artists".. I have to specify " lost interest in the late '90's " instead.
3) Cars : again lost interest in the mid to late '90s, depending on particular brand and model. It all started going downhill to me, from that point. So Used to say " I don't like modern cars "... but now a 20 year old is hardly new anymore... so it's not a matter of old or new anymore...
[...] The terminals were gone; there were PCs on the desktop, but they still ran serial lines to the host and opened terminal connections. IBM still was pretending that Broken Thing was going to beat Ethernet, so shipping a host with onboard Ethernet was out of the question, or I'd converted them to Telnet or SSH immediately. There even was a serial multiplex line across town to the warehouse,
Yeah these old terminal based application software just don't wat to die.
I remember in 2004 I worked for 6 month in a warehouse of computer parts. They had desktop computers everywhere but they were still using a virtual terminal S/W on the PC to run their ancient server based application. I remember that the title bar in the terminal window on the PC said " AS400 "... it would crash very now and then and the guy in charge of administering the system would com eot us and say "OK I just restarted AS400, should be back and working in XX minutes..... " or something.
Looking at Wikipedia, looks like "AS400" was the name of the H/W running the OS/system... an IBM server.
Hell.... even right now in 2022, the H/W store I go to all the time, the biggest in France... when you get to check out, if you look at their computer screen yuo can see they run the checkout with some app in a virtual terminal ! Maybe AS/400 again who knows !
It assume it costs so much to migrate a large organization / business to a modern / all new platform, new software etc... that it's likely in 20 years tehy will still be using their virtual terminal simply because it works, does the job, and spending millions migrating/upgrading, and going through the growing pains can only be justified if it can demonstrated that doping so will save the company millions every years.
this is never gonna happen...
Only way they will give up their ancient server / terminal system is if there is a technical aspect that forces them to do so... or some law is voted they forces them to do something their system can't do...
Nothing wrong with that, I just love ASCII / curses based programs. Lightweight, easy to read on the screen, responsive, run on modest H/W, even small 8 bits micro-controllers I bet....
Hell, even brand new computers still use text interfaces in their BIOS !
There must be a reason for it... They could easily implement a full blown graphical user interface with mouse and touch screen if they wanted to.