Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!rutgers!att!ihlpb!gregg From: gregg@ihlpb.ATT.COM (Wonderly) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: AT&T 630 terminal - software ?? Message-ID: <9434@ihlpb.ATT.COM> Date: 18 Jan 89 22:01:42 GMT References: <1800005@spdyne> Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois Lines: 82 From article <1800005@spdyne>, by root@spdyne.UUCP: > >> In article <1003@vsi.COM>, friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes: >> > ... if you can >> > get it for under $2k then go for it. > > And just think, We are paying about $2,400 for an AST 286/10 With > 1 Meg of Ram, EGA, 1 Serial & 1 Par. W/ Multi-Sync monitor... They make > fine terminals.... I see no reason to "go for it" at all.. For 500 bucks > more I can get a Amber monitor? (Yes, I KNOW that this is ONLY a terminal > and I am talking about getting a real computer for use as a 'smart terminal', > but then, why not? Unless you are doing I/O at 19,200 And doing large block > transfers (Graphic pages using >20K or so per page), I see little reason > to buy terminals at all anymore... > > On the other hand, I haven't ever seen on of these terminals, so > who knows it might even outperform a programable computer... :-) The point of the 630 is that the software base is already there, that is if you have either an AT&T 3B computer or you or your vendor has licensed the source for the driver. I use a 615 which pages 3 different layers in a 24x80 screen. Mine has no memory for applications, but the manuals hint that there is some other capabilities. The 620 is supposedly closer to the 630, but I do not have any experience with one. I use 3 24x80 layers which allows me to have a news window, a work window, and a mail window into the unix machine that I use. There are many benefits to this in terms of work convienience and user community conviences. In terms of the user community, they are not paying the continual price of me starting subprocesses to do thing from other applications as I get new mail or are otherwise distracted. On small machines, this can be a real benefit. If your machine only swaps, and doesn't page, then there will be some swapping overhead that will happen when I switch to a different layer and start typing at it (providing it has been setting there idle, thus causing it to be swapped). There are many-MANY things nice about the 630 environment compared to the 615. For one, the larger screen allows you to have 2 completely visible 24x80 windows. With memory expansion and the second hardware port, the 630 can give you 14 windows, 7 per host. Some say that is more than you would ever use, but I have used a 630 on occasion, and have used all 7 windows on one host and had 3 on another. To do what I needed to do would have required me to find 10 different terminals because I needed to have keyboard interaction with 10 different processes. Shell Layers would not have worked because the 10 processes all have common output that would have became intermingled and indistinguishable. As for PC's... As long as people continue to buy those damn Intel Processors, we will never see real processing power at reasonable prices. The manufacturers need to sell enough of their products (I am purposely not mentioning another manufacturer) to pay for tooling before they are going to reduce their prices. Besides, if you think that your AST/286 is so good, run the following C program, if you get the output 1 70000 Your C compiler wins my award for effort otherwise you won't get any words of sympathy from me... main () { unsigned long i; char *s, *malloc(); s = malloc ((unsigned)70000); for (i=0; i < ((unsigned)70000); i++) s[i] = i; printf ("%d\n%d\n", s[1], s[(unsigned)70000]); } -- Gregg Wonderly DOMAIN: gregg@ihlpb.att.com AT&T Bell Laboratories UUCP: att!ihlpb!gregg