I had a Wyse dumb terminal attached to my main Linux workstation for a few years in the late 90s, back when such things were fairly easy to pick up for free.
Its not to be sneezed at for doing serious programming work. The green on black, text only CRT was super high contrast (especially compared to any modern LCD), and the complete lack of distractions that come with a multitasking desktop environment (email notifications, chat, web browsers, Facebook, etc) mean that it's productive for serious work, and pretty much only serious work. I'd happily do this again if I could get them for free, but paying shipping seems a bit much.
Wyse attached to my Linux workstation in the late 90s too.
My Linux workstation's monitor was mainly in text-mode too. I used the Wyse to tail some logs and used vim and a shell for 'real' work on 2 VTs, with IRC and mutt on a couple more.
All this talk about how expensive serial terminals are now makes me think I should have kept some of the hundreds I threw away over the years, but then I think about the storage required!
Is the contrast on an old CRT really better than on a modern LCD screen ? I find that a bit hard to believe but I certainly don't have any way to check. You could run a plain vanilla window manager with a single xterm if you want to avoid distractions.
It depends. You can crank up the brightness much higher on a CRT, and so you can get better contrast in a sunny room. In a dark room, any decent LCD and any half-decent CRT can get the characters uncomfortably bright.
But it's only 80x25! I may have read megabytes of email and Usenet on such things, but I always lusted over the big displays of the Suns that could fit 40 rows down, and change character size to match my desires.
So I'm all for adding more screen real estate, but a VT220 isn't my pick for best way to do that. I prefer a second large monitor in portrait mode.
Sure, CRTs have better contrast than LCDs in general, but monochrome CRTs have incredible contrast. I guess it's because they don't have separate red / green / blue subpixels (2/3rds of which would be off for green on a color CRT). Also, the particular shade of green phosphor they use is really intense, I guess they just use the wavelength the eye is most sensitive too, because they don't care about how it mixes with other colors.
Ha ha! I suffer ocular migraines and found that a super huge font helps me avoid migraines. With the font I use, I get 111x26 :-) One of the things that prompted me to try such a ridiculous font is remembering using 80x25 terminals for the first few years of my career. I have absolutely no trouble programming this way. Trying to pair program like that, though, is problematic ;-)
Its not to be sneezed at for doing serious programming work. The green on black, text only CRT was super high contrast (especially compared to any modern LCD), and the complete lack of distractions that come with a multitasking desktop environment (email notifications, chat, web browsers, Facebook, etc) mean that it's productive for serious work, and pretty much only serious work. I'd happily do this again if I could get them for free, but paying shipping seems a bit much.