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The WOT (Wall Of Terminals)

The Wall Of Terminals was a high-tech response to something a competitor was doing in their benchmarking centre with 50 dumb terminals, namely showing the state of simulated users during large scale multiuser testing.

My design consisted of the following hardware:

• a custom built piece of furniture
• six dual-headed SPARCstation 5 workstations
• two triple-headed SPARCstation 10 workstations
• eighteen premium 21 inch Sun monitors

• scripts for building cloned diskless boot environments for the eigt workstations
• a CDE application which multiplexed up to 48 DtTerm widgets in one window
• a multithreaded application routing up to 864 pseudo terminals across 18 instances of the above
• a Java applet to reconfigure the number of DtTerm widgets displayed on the fly, and to select one to
zoom

The WOT was instrumental in winning a huge MRP deal in the aerospace industry, but also proved very useful as a collection of eighteen X11 screen for displaying just about any benchmark data. My WOT also won an innovation award at the second Sun Technical Symposium in San Francisco.

Posted at 12:53PM Sep 03, 2009 by pgdh in General  |