[laumars]

I used those same winterms too. The problem was we were then updating our network for PCI compliance and one of the issues we had was our call centre teams used old green screens which were connected to via telnet and there was no way to update these winterms to install PuTTY.

Then I hit upon the idea of using them as even more dumb terminals. So I set up a PXE server that would serve an NFS volume hosting a minimal Linux distro and setting those winterms to boot via DHCP.

Surprisingly those winterms not only supported Linux but ran it really well.

This system ran for several years until those old green screens were replaced with web front ends instead. Which made me sad for two reasons, firstly the end of the PXE solution which works so smoothly, and secondly seeing the old green screen server decommissioned, which was a Sun SPARC box bought in the 90s and had an uptime of something ridiculous like 8 years.