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
and the following software:
- scripts for building cloned diskless boot environments for the eight 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.