Timeline for What is a Dumb Terminal?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 14, 2022 at 13:29 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | @MichaelKay Sometimes yes - smaller system can afford to interrupt "everything/everyone". Sometimes no - mainframe more likely to have a true separate I/O processor. | |
| Jan 14, 2022 at 9:24 | comment | added | Michael Kay | Indeed. Perhaps the minicomputer operating systems were also better at doing the interrupt handling necessary to process individual keystrokes. | |
| Jan 14, 2022 at 0:51 | comment | added | cjs | It might be more correct to state that the minicomputers had enough CPU power to spare to do all the low-level keystroke processing in the main processor. They were not actually more powerful CPUs than mainframes of the time; it was more the willingness of the users and owners to spend their CPU power on that. (Individual machines generally had far fewer users and much less overall load, even sitting idle from time to time, so spending cycles on this was much less likely to significantly delay another user's application.) | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 0:47 | history | answered | Michael Kay | CC BY-SA 4.0 |