[rescue] NCD 88K Xterminal video adapter

[Stephen Conley]

In the 'good old days', X was designed to send as little as possible 
over the wire to render window contents, and it enabled fun stuff like 
these X terminals to be viable and responsive. Text, for instance, was 
more or less handled as text.

To support fancy fonts, you basically have to make images out of the 
fonts themselves.  Images are one of the most 'costly' things to send 
over X protocol.  It turns it less into a protocol for window management 
and more into a super clunky "RDP" at best and something completely 
non-functional at worse (I believe certain rendering features require 
both client and server to be on the same machine).

It reminds me of when RDP for Windows first came out back in the day; it 
was really 'chunky' and nasty even on a LAN, whereas properly written X 
programs could run nearly as well over a network as locally.  Nowdays 
it's flipped; X is really not optimized for image streaming and IMO an X 
program that's image heavy is way worse than RDP.

It's pretty sad because it's undercutting one of X's coolest 
'superpowers' if it can't work right over the network.  And it's a 
'superpower' I have used many, many times even to this day.  A text 
editor or an xterm over X is infinitely smoother and more enjoyable to 
use than the same over VNC or RDP.

Ah well :)

On 3/28/23 09:47, Liam Proven via rescue wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Mar 2023 at 19:29, Dennis Boone via rescue
> <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
>> Virtually everything other than
>> xterm these days insists on rendering fonts server-side, making it
>> utterly painful to use even over gig-E.
> I do not know much of the low-level stuff of X11 at all. Why is this bad?
>
>