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My own pet peeve with "ugly" is specific to terminal emulation. The use of "alphabet soup" status lines in WSF was understandable (although products like the standalone emulator packaged with Andrew twinax cards over a decade ago demonstrate that it was hardly necessary!)

But why in blazes did Wall Data use alphabet soup for RUMBA?? And why, when they finally did offer a GUI-look status line, was THAT just an even egregiously cryptic example of alphabet soup? Hadn't the people at Wall Data ever seen a real terminal? Or if they had, hadn't they seen any as recent as, say, a 3180?

Then there's the handful of "genuine IBM" emulators. Sure, they've got status lines that look like status lines on real terminals. Real 3270 terminals! Ye vish! They INVENTED the 5250 terminal; you'd think they'd be able to come up with an aesthetically pleasing emulation of one!



Oh, and technically, "dumb terminal," strictly speaking, means an ASCII-based "glass teletype," without cursor addressing, much less attributes. Machines like the Lear Siegler ADM-3, or a number of similarly Spartan models from Teleray. In particular, there is nothing "dumb" about ADM-1s, Datamedia Elites, Teleray 10s, or DEC VT52s and VT100s. And most especially, there is nothing the least bit dumb about anything that uses the 3270 or 5250 data streams.

Non-programmable, yes (although InfoWindow IIs do have programmable mouse button capability). Dumb, no.

--
JHHL

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