This should be in technical but...

[Cliphead]

Has anyone else tried Xerox's new "graphical" user interface? It's available on other platforms now too, and is quite a revelation once you get used to it. You use this pointing device, called a "mouse" to move a little arrow around the screen and "click" on buttons or options to make things happen, meaning no need to learn 150 different obscure command line options. A lot of people are hopeful this will finally move computers on from being a toy for a small number of sandle wearing, mother-living geeks to a useful tool for ordinary people to use in every day tasks.

Only wimps need a gui.

[d000hg]

Absolutely loath the DOS prompt (or whatever it's called these days).

Absolutely love Bash. Well worth learning to use it effectively imho.

First software to be installed on a new Windows machine is Cygwin usually.

As for colours, definitely white on black, with coloured prompt and 'ls' highlighting enabled.

You know Windows has moved past the DOS/Command prompt these days... I think one is supposed to use Powershell instead.

[Sysman]

I had a couple of VT220 terminals myself but couldn't be arsed shipping them here to the mainland when I moved - the one on the right here:



My favourite was a DEC VT520, which supported scrolling beyond the standard 24 lines and had copy and paste which came in handy for its multiple session support. Probably the best keyboard I have ever used too.

Since then I have used Terminal sessions inside a window manager. My default on this box is 6 Terminal sessions when I log in. I use black on white because that seems more consistent across the monitors I have here than white on black.

The last time I used a real terminal was in a server room the size of a footie field. They had a few sitting on "crash carts" which you could wheel to the server of your choice, plug in, and off you went. Not just as consoles for headless servers, but for plugging into disk controllers.

[Cliphead]

I use green on black whatever terminal I use, with ansi colours too of course.

I find it easier on the eyes but I remember several movies from way back that whenever they showed a computer monitor it was always green on black, remember 'mother' in the original Alien movie?

[Contreras]

[d000hg]

I never got into black background, even though I learned back on DOS... mainly because I can rarely be bothered spending my time customising what colours are used.

One of the main coding sites I used to be on a lot had a black background theme, when they finally upgraded to a proper forum software they changed the theme to a more normal theme - similar to CUK - and the fallout was incredible. Multiple threads a day of people saying they "literally can't use the site" and "am leaving because it hurts my eyes".

[Sysman]

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.



Hazeltine 2000 vdu, 80 col x 27 lines.

The 27 line thing made it a bit awkward to replace since everything newer appeared to have a maximum of 24 lines.

Had fun with a 25 line one. The programmers would write their stuff for 25 lines but the O/S utilities expected 24 lines by default.

You could modify that 24 lines default, but then you found other stuff that didn't honour it.

And got everything scrolling on one line.

Or the whole screen jumping up a line at a time.

Oh what fun.

[Moscow Mule]

Check this bad-boy out - TWO sessions!!!

[MyUserName]

I started on Windows NT using C++ with MFC. On my first day my manager said "Can you program?" and I said "No" so he said "Here's a book, learn to program. Our demo application does not work and we need you to fix it".

This kickstarted my career although it also meant that I never learned to use DOS or batch commands etc.

I did one job in a linux house where I had to use it and became quite adept at getting done what I wanted to get done but a new CEO took over who wanted everyone to have 10 year linux backgrounds so he showed me the door *shrug*.