We had WYSE dumb-terminals with orange plasma displays in my high school, with an empty slot to upgrade them to smart terminals. The keyboards were very reliable. They saw a lot of use for "WordPerfect 1.0 for UNIX".
The most unfortunate thing was that if you didn't stagger logins, the poor little minicomputer they talked to would slow to a crawl. Try getting 40 people to sign in at once, and the mini would became unresponsive for all or most of a 45 minute class period. But groups of five, and you could get ~50 people signed-in in few minutes.
The most unfortunate thing was that if you didn't stagger logins, the poor little minicomputer they talked to would slow to a crawl. Try getting 40 people to sign in at once, and the mini would became unresponsive for all or most of a 45 minute class period. But groups of five, and you could get ~50 people signed-in in few minutes.