On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 12:51:33 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/09/2019 10:17 PM, wrote:
I am not sure about what happened in the upside down world south of
the equator but we sold the **** out of PCs being used as smart
terminals here in the US. In fact by the early 90s it was getting hard
to find dumb terminals in anything but the places with the simplest
applications with marginally trained workers.

It's been a while since I've seen an ADM-3A or VT100

As a sign of the times, Windows 7 dumped ANSI.sys. We have an elderly
database utility that depended on curses for the interface. I briefly
looked at dragging it into the 21st century before I found DOSBox. The
gamers saved the day, I guess. The utility was a cryptic piece of work
to start with and I doubt many people even remember how to use it. At
the time the VP was fond of it and the hack kept him happy.

When the buzz turned to thin clients, SaaS, and so forth my thought was
'IBM finally won.' The mainframe became AWS and we're back to very
powerful dumb terminals.

I just have painful memories of using a cross-assembler on a PDP-11
hidden in some dark dungeon which was usually being hogged by the
payroll department.

I am still running dBase 4 in DOSBOX on this machine. It works great.
I have had mixed results with ANSI.SYS though since W/98 went away.