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Dell To Acquire Wyse 95

Posted by timothy from the oh-is-that-what-they're-calling-it-these-days? dept.
New submitter alancronin writes "Computer and IT giant Dell said today it will acquire privately held Wyse Technology, a company that specializes in what it calls 'cloud client computing.'"
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Dell To Acquire Wyse More

Dell To Acquire Wyse

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  • Dumb (Score:5, Funny)

    by generationxyu ( 630468 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @09:23AM (#39559773) Homepage
    What an idea to acquire such a terminally dumb company.

  • Oh god (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dyinobal ( 1427207 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @09:24AM (#39559795)
    When I was in highschool my school used Wyse Terminals which was the most bad and ironic name I've ever seen. I hated those things..every one hated those things. They broke all the time and had to constantly be reflashed with a new image. They were so awful that by my Senior year they were being phased out entirely.

    • Re:Oh god (Score:5, Interesting)

      by vlm ( 69642 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @09:41AM (#39560055)

      That was the latter years. The old ones were beyond awesome. A good rule of thumb for wyse terms was if you could not flash it, it was old enough to be fantastic, and if you could, its a turd. I have an old one on my desk for embedded work... Hey I've got the space, can always use another screen, etc. Kinda sucks for cut and paste, but perfect for watching logs and boot messages scroll by...

      • Yeah I'd say it's hit-or-miss depending on the models, even today.

        I've got a lot of s30's that have run like champs for years now. I don't think I've had a single one go bad yet that didn't involve something stupid (knock on wood).

        I do have some of their 9650 all-in-ones for kiosk applications and some of the old... 3125's (I think?). Those have been terrible. I just replace them with s30's and similar, and they're gtg forever.

      • Re:Oh god (Score:4, Interesting)

        by zipn00b ( 868192 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @10:45AM (#39560929)
        Yeah I did a LOT of installs from the Mid '80s on using mostly Wyse 50 or 60 terminals hanging off SCO boxes ( back when SCO was a real company not a lawsuit factory) And I was supporting software running on old SCO boxes 20 years later that still only ran nicely with Wyse 60 emulation instead of the default VT100 that so much terminal software assumed everything liked. I think it was in the mid-90's that I started replacing the WY60 terminals with emulators as it ended up being cheaper to run that over TCP/IP instead of hanging a terminal off a multi-port serial card. But for a long time one of my disaster backup plans had a couple locations stocked with the old terminals in case a hurricane took out our main office. Never used any of the newer line of terminals so can't say how good or bad they were but the old Wyse terminals worked great for a LONG time....

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by vlm ( 69642 )

          Eventually the onboard nicad config batteries fail and leak... gotta pull them and replace with a little 2-cell AA battery holder from radio shack.

          nicad juice will rot the traces if not caught in time.

          Its a storage issue. Left plugged in forever, the battery never discharges so it never corrodes.

        • Yeah I did a LOT of installs from the Mid '80s on using mostly Wyse 50 or 60 terminals hanging off SCO boxes ( back when SCO was a real company not a lawsuit factory) And I was supporting software running on old SCO boxes 20 years later

          When I was an engineer at Altos Computer Systems, the engineers were asked to evaluate an early model Wyse terminal. This was because Don Valentine [Sequoia Capital] was an Altos investor and on the board and he was interested in investing in Wyse. The model we got was a bit boxy/clunky (it predated the later WY-30/55/60's that sold like hotcakes) but we felt it had potential. Eventually, a Wyse terminal was usually paired with an Altos system. In particular, the Altos ACS 586.

          SCO didn't manufacture h

      • Agreed. I really liked those terminals.

      • My only experience with Wyse terminals was my local public library. In the early 90's they migrated from a manual card catalog / checkout system to a computer based one. Wyse terminals were located through the library, and at the checkout. It was revolutionary! You could modem (and eventually telnet) into the system to look up or renew books! They also had a couple Wyse terminals in the back connected to the local Freenet for public internet access.

        They built a new branch 10 years ago that had brand new Wys

    • When I was in highschool my school used Wyse Terminals which was the most bad and ironic name I've ever seen. I hated those things..every one hated those things. They broke all the time and had to constantly be reflashed with a new image. They were so awful that by my Senior year they were being phased out entirely.

      YMMV. I had an admin job back in the late 90s that involved entering information into a dumb green-screen terminal. It was as tedious as hell, but at least the dumb Wyse terminal I was using- some of the time- had arguably the best mechanical key action (*) of any keyboard I've used, marginally beating the late-era Model B BBC Micros. Crappily, they later got some beige box PCs running a terminal emulator under NT that came with some mediocre generic membrane crap. To be fair, I'm not anti-membrane, as some

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by archen ( 447353 )

        Totally agree with you about the keyboard. I really wish I could use it on a PC. I have the feeling that it would be nearly impossible to replicate today, just by the nature of materials and quality that were probably involved in making them. The closest I've found that I've liked is the overly expensive Das Keyboard.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Misagon ( 1135 )

          Some of the Wyse PCE keyboards (with IBM PC like layout) talk the PS/2 protocol and can be connected directly to a modern PC with or without a simple adapter. Look for model numbers 900840 and 900866.

          The key switches in the Wyse keyboards are "Cherry MX Black". There are now loads of new keyboards with the different variations of the Cherry MX (black, red, blue, brown...) -- because they have become popular for computer gaming. One of the first, and now most inexpensive models with blacks, was Steelserie

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gmarsh ( 839707 )

        100% agreement on what constitutes a good keyboard.

        I'm rockin' a Das Keyboard "Model S Professional Silent" on my work PC, and I'm pretty happy with it.

        I won't call it silent by any stretch; the switches don't click at the tactile point like an IBM Model M keyboard, but there's a pretty loud clack when you bottom out a key. The tactile "give" is still there - but it's a lot "softer" than the M. When you push down on a M key, there's an increasing resistance until BANG, the bottom pretty much falls out of th

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      I administered on a network where we used the Wyse terminals as dumb clients to talk to our in-house time (accounting) server. We had about 200 of them, of two different vintages.

      We had old Wyse and new Wyse. The old ones ran an in-house rolled BSD, but the new ones were WinCE 4.x or 3.x and we weren't able to flash them with a newer BSD ROM due to the hardware being incompatible.

      We ended up buying replacements for the newer model with the old models on Ebay.

      I have no idea how their products have performed

    • Not sure how old you are, but we run 99% of our 2500 machine fleet on Wyse with Vmware View and Windows and they work very well. Maybe your implementation wasn't so good? (although I can't see how you could screw up a simple thin client roll out).

  • Can't wait to see the rebranded offerings (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sheehaje ( 240093 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @09:27AM (#39559825)

    Maybe Dell can finally offer an affordable thinclient. I am a big fan of their FX100, but it is priced out of range. By the time you license it and plug it in, it costs as much as a small form factor desktop. Not exactly the value customers are looking at with thin clients.

    Lately we've been using PanoLogic Zero Clients. They are basically glorified network cards in a cube. No RAM, Processor, or other overhead that is prevalent in traditional ThinCleints. They are inexpensive and have a good management tool. Its inevitable that someone buys them out at some point.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 )

      Lately we've been using PanoLogic Zero Clients. They are basically glorified network cards in a cube.

      Would a Raspberry Pi work as a thin client? You could just attach it to the back of the monitor with sticky tape, plug in monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Ethernet, and then arrange for it to boot over the network.

      • Yes, a Raspberry PI would work great as a thin client, just have to have the specific agent for whatever system you are running on the backend. I imagine there would be some tweaking involved to get audio/video streams that sync well. As for booting over the network, wouldn't really need to if you can have a small image on the device. The screen is delivered from the backend servers/clusters anyway. I guess upgrading the image would be easier with booting over the network, but not neccessary. This is w

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
          Yeah, that's the reason I suggested network boot, for ease of management - but provided it can be updated remotely by the administrator, booting a local image would also work well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Dell offered a thinclient a couple years ago, IIRC. It was fairly affordable for the time.

      You can find thinclients in the ~$350 ballpark, but that's a bit expensive compared to what's capable with ARM devices now. I imagine you could get them down to $200 and run Android without much problem at all and still have decent quality - their specifications don't need to be that steep, and a Beagleboard spec'd device would more than do the job.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • It isn't about the purchase price, that is not the point. Thin clients should be plug and play--no administration. That is the real savings.

          Exactly right. This is why Wyse thin-clients are popular at places like banks. You don't need to have an IT guy driving all over hell's half acre to the 100 branches fixing them. They just work. And as for the endpoint cost, you also need to factor in the server costs.

    • I use OpenThinClient.Org and $45 diskless workstations from Geeks.com. Works better than the $250 HP's we have.

    • Re:Can't wait to see the rebranded offerings (Score:4, Informative)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @11:04AM (#39561175)

      Maybe Dell can finally offer an affordable thinclient. I am a big fan of their FX100, but it is priced out of range. By the time you license it and plug it in, it costs as much as a small form factor desktop. Not exactly the value customers are looking at with thin clients.

      The point was I think that the savings would come from not having to replace it ever unless it broke - so it would last 10+ years or three or four generations of desktops. The other savings was on the IT side - less management (these things boot up, there's nothing to break, nothing the user can download and infect it, etc) and just having to upgrade the server when necessary.

      Of course, most businesses got sticker shock since they had to make huge IT investments, which they were loathe to do - big powerful servers/blades had to be bought, and terminals that cost the same as a desktop. From an initial investment, it didn't make sense since few businesses plan for such timespans...

    • The FX100 is generally used for keeping the admins out of the dino-pen. If they're in the same building they can't complain about lag or latency since there's dedicated hardware on the other end to squeeze bits over ethernet.

      A hardware solution to a people-problem.

    • I suggest you check out evga.com's PD02 client. I have bought dozens of them, and they are sleek, cheap ($300) and identically technically to the FX100/P20.

  • Cloud? Why don't we... (Score:4, Informative)

    by PixetaledPikachu ( 1007305 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @09:27AM (#39559841)
    ...call it what it is: Thin Client. Wyse offers pretty good range of thin clients, from Windows embedded to Linux with built in ICA client. We ended up going with HP, since Wyse's equivalent was pricier

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      Because managers seems to like new buzzwords for old things, and seem to like reinventing the wheel. This, however, is a first in that it's not reinventing the wheel so much as it's repackaging it and calling it something else.

  • I had a Wyse 286 back in the day. Now I know what happened to them...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Camaro ( 13996 )

      I had one, too. It was my first "real" computer and I bought it at an auction for a farm equipment dealership that was going out of business in 1991. It was a cool machine with the CPU on a card plugged into a daughterboard. It aso has a 70MB hard drive which was pretty big for those days. I had to pull a tape drive to install a 3.5" floppy drive. I still miss the keyboard.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      They continued their terminal biz for another 20 years and got into thin clients in the 2000's. They were smart enough to get out of the "me too" IBM clone market, right as everyone and their mother was bleeding out cash to stay up to date and fail (386 maybe 486 era, never saw a wyse 486 myself, but we still have a wyse 386 controlling an even older robotic line at work which I get to fix now and then as I am apparently the only one around dumb enough to say "heh I was a computer tech back when those thing

  • Dell is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...next they will buy RIM...lol.

  • Dell has lost its way (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Michael Dell should shut down the company and give the money back to the shareholders

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      No, the shareholders are getting what they deserve. Shareholders demand 10% growth every year. When PCs are in decline (laptops and handhelds are taking off), you buy Alienware to try to keep your 10% growth. Then, when you need more things to sell, you buy Sonicwall, to add to the other networking companies you've already acquired. Looks like thin clients are making a comeback? Wyse it is. They'll acquire their way to greatness or bankruptcy, all to fit the demands of the shareholders, not in spite o
  • Wyse is a bit of a relic. What next? Zenith Data Systems? Kaypro?

  • ZeroClient (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    PCoIP and Zero Clients have become very usable in the last few years. My current company is using the WYSE P20 zero clients for our contractors. The Wyse nowadays is just a network-KVM for a VM

  • Does Wyse have some sort of secret management-sauce that I've not dealt with in my own relatively small deployments?

    I can easily see that thin clients are something that Dell would be interested in selling; but buying out a company to move into a market is usually something you do if the product is in some what specialized.

    Thin clients are basically the most boring single-board computers available(with specs somewhere between embedded desktops-level and weedy ARM SoC, depending on how 'thin' the custo

    • not tough to break in to, but now Dell has an existing installed base, some internal knowledge and relationships to support that base, and one less competitor to deal with. Buying this is probably cheaper than spending a year or two building it up.

      • I deployed three Dell PCoIP thin clients for some public kiosks in a hotel. 16 months ago.

        They had the best pricing and the integration with VMView was seamless. What's that about an existing installed base? This is about patents.

    • Um...patents? (Score:5, Informative)

      by robla ( 4860 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @09:57AM (#39560293) Homepage Journal

      From TFA: "The company has more than 180 patents, both issued and pending, covering its solutions, software and differentiated intellectual property."

    • You also buy a company if it's a good bargain. The fact that everyone is now selling thin clients really takes away Wyse's competitive edge, so they were probably looking for a buyer. Throw in some nice IP and a distribution network, and an acquisition like this makes a lot of sense, if the price was right.

    • Dell's been growing quite a bit in the server market lately. I could see them wanting to preen the client side components in order to offer a more complete and integrated virtualization stack.
    • Dell wants to sell the SERVERS that all these thin-client Wyse terminals hook up to. Racks and racks of servers...

  • Why is slashdot so behind (Score:3)

    by gubers33 ( 1302099 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @09:50AM (#39560191)
    This was announced yesterday and I actually saw it in the firehouse yesterday. Yet it isn't posted on Slashdot til today.

  • So does this mean a wyse60 emulation now becomes a dell60 emulation. Oh the poor termcap databases, how will it ever deal. :)

  • Incomplete summary (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The summary is incomplete. It contains only facts from which readers might ask questions, spur conversation and draw conclusions.

    Where's the unfounded speculation?
    Where's the flamebait anti-[COMPANY/PRODUCT] FUD?
    Where's the troll-tastic open-ended question?

    Get with it /. editors, we won't stand for this kind of sloppy workmanship!

  • What hubris Dell has to think it can turn around a relic like Wyse. This will magically put them at the forefront of cloud computing, the next iCloud!

    This will be fun to watch. Any wagers on how long before they sell this off on their way down the death spiral?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      they just need couple of fat patents from them and bam it's lawsuit time for onlive&etc.

  • Dell to acquire Wyse (Score:3)

    by ChrisMaple ( 607946 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @12:37PM (#39562271)
    But not wisdom.
  • This seems like a good place to ask if anyone has experience with the Wyse 901867-01 terminal keyboards? There are some for sale on Ebay UK at the moment and they look good (Cherry MX black switches, apparently) but the connector is nonstandard. Can it be converted to USB or PS/2?

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