Full Circle, SPC 11 HOL, from dumb terminals to smart ones-very green!

I go back to the days of “dumb terminals” below is pic of “dumb terminal”, connected to mainframe computer, user limited to only the functionality provided at great expense by programmers (think punch cards, which I used in college).  GUI?  What’s that? 

A Televideo ASCII character mode terminal, circa1982

 

Continuing the history lesson, below is pic of 1st IBM PC, also a green screen, which we used, it transitioned us from expensive “timesharing” computer use (both for us as devs and for our users–think $12k per month timeshare bill to process data entry from 500 1-page forms) to stand-alone microcomputers, joining the “Power to the Users” Revolution!) 

The first IBM PC, dual floppy disk, green screen-predates MS-DOS, cost $20k

But very cool (literally as well as figuratively), the machines at the Hands-On-Labs at the SharePoint Conference 2011 use a terminal and Microsoft Embedded.  No more portable warming units negatively impacting the air conditioning system (but thanks for having them when they were state of the art-Hands-On-Labs are awesome!) 

Computer terminals at SPC Hands-On-Labs use Windows Embedded and very little power.

Even greener (and way cool), the hands-on labs are accessible virtually on your own machine from the time the physical HOL room closes until it opens the next morning (and for 2 months following the SharePoint Conference).

Only improvement would be if the monitors in the physical lab had a screen saver that went blank after 5 minutes or so, I was told they were not sure Embedded supported that.

Microsoft Embedded team?

(What are you doing to reduce the energy impact/footprint of the devices you use?  Have you baselined to find out what your current impact/footprint is?  Has anyone calculated the differential energy impact across the 3 scenarios? )

Welcome to GreeNTUG!

Green and Sustainability in the .Net world.

Quick intro:

My definitions:  Green is the planet, sustainability you add people.

Sustainabilty starts with your user’s joints, ligaments and tendons.  People are our greatest resource, remember?  So never 2 keystrokes when 1 will do.  Now, we have to add gestures, ergonomic load, and cognitive load as part of the metrics of the sustainabilty of your aps.

Windows 8 brings us exciting opportunities to explore these topics (and to improve the software experience we provide to our users, while reducing the “footprint” of our aps as well!

More later,