This reminds me of how expensive RAM was back then. I remember spending $180 to add 512KB to my Amiga 500 in 1988 or so. $180 was a lot of money back then.
IIRC, one of the 8-bit Atari magazines had an article describing a similar setup back in the mid/later 80s. Basically, put a photoresistor in a shroud (I used the cap from a Bic pen and some electrical tape), attach it to the dot matrix print head and wire it to the Atari joystick port's analog/paddle input. Place a bright light over the printer. Then the software told the printer to move the print head back and forth while it read the port value. The image quality was terrible but it was a fun project.
Chess? Wow. I did some 6502 programming in hex on my Atari 800XL, but just for simple things like display list interupts. I had a list of all the 6502 opcodes and hex encodings from a magazine or book and figured it out from there.
I loved programming in Action! The editor was great and both compilation and runtime were really fast. I used it for several years from high school into college until I got an Amiga. I wrote a paint program, 3D modeler and 3D renderer with Action! No floating point. Fixed-point math with lookup tables for sin/cos/etc.
I have an SGI price sheet from July 1993. A 4xR4400/150Mhz, 64MB Onyx RealityEngine2 went for $199,999. Adding 64MB RAM cost another $11,000. The GE board had 12 i860 processors. The big rack-based system w/ 24 CPUs was $634,900.
And people complain about the prices of GPUs nowadays...
I concur. My childhood LEGO from 1980-ish (now my son's) have noticeable color and fit variation. Still usable, but definitely not as nice as the new stuff.
I think there's kind of two aspects to that (why client/server):
1. The X protocol was roughly like an evolution of the VT-like protocols which were used for text-based terminals back in the day. Those protocols supported cursor control, simple character-based graphics, and later, simple vector graphics. X was an evolution of that to deal with bitmapped displays, mice, etc.
2. Hardware was pretty expensive. Giving everyone in the office an X terminal was far cheaper than giving everyone a workstation. Again, that was an evolution of VT terminals vs. minicomputers.
Even X terminals weren't cheap. In the early 90's a monochrome 15" terminal could be a couple thousand dollars while the workstation was at least 10x more.
OpenGL actually had support for color index rendering. See glIndexi(), glClearIndex(), etc. I think it was primarily used for hardware overlay planes on graphics systems like RealityEngine.
I sometimes laugh to myself when people complain about the price of GPUs. Yes, $10,000 is a lot, but in historical context, it's pretty reasonable for top of the line technology.