"Rufus J. Flywheel" <sulu @cml.com> writes:
 
>VIEW is an HP product.  It was originally called VIEW/3000.
 
 
 
>So HP changed the name to V/3000.
>Then HP was sued by another company which had copyrighted that name.
>So HP changed the name to V+ or V-Plus.
>It's a terrible product.
 
 
I almost resisted the opportunity - but the best part about temptation is
giving in to it.
 
No - no - no! VPlus is not a terrible product - it represents one of the
earliest attempts to think about and implement a useful method of doing
distributed user interface management. Granted the level of CPU availability
in a terminal is limited (understatement of the year?) but the most
important thing about VPlus is that the terminal does the work, and tells
the host ONLY when it's finished. This means that all of the bandwidth wasted
when users make mistakes, correct typos, etc is now available for other uses.
 
Granted:
 
1)  The serial connection used by terminals when VPlus was introduced was
    unavailable for other use,
2)  Single character keystrokes are not going to represent a terribly high
    load on the CPU (but think about the history of serial interfaces on the
    3k!)
 
Now consider:
 
X - 2 letters down the road, and a 'nice, sexy GUI environment', which is
perfectly capable of bringing your network to a grinding halt, because every
single mouse move, click etc gets sent over the network, and the host is
responsible for telling the X display what to do!
 
This is the reason that Motif/iX requires a separate Un*x box - to manage the
windows.
 
As much as WIndows is a maligned and somewhat yucky solution, it has the
important feature that its GUI management is internal. This means that it
can (theoretically at least) provide the same simple elegant control
mechanisms that VPlus used, extended of course to cope with the added
complexity of a GUI type environment.
 
We should be working very closely with HP to see how the VPlus way of doing
things can be meaningfully implemented on PCs, Workstation etc, etc.
 
</rant>
 
Now I feel better!
TOny