petel@tekig.UUCP (07/03/84)
First: I am not employed by Beehive or I don't have any stock in Beehive I have been evaluating so called ANSI terminals for about two years now, and have been very disapointed. Then one day I saw an ad for the ATL-008, but from Beehive ?!?. Well I have been 'playing' around with one for about three weeks now, and I think they have something here. The terminal that I have has some fimrware bugs, but the factory is sending up some new ROMS (SIX 27128's, thats a lot of firmware). They Beehive seem to be trying to 're-enter' the market place. The only problems I see are price ($1700 list with 128k of RAM) and they don't seem to have an aggressive marketing dept. ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE HAVE ONE OF THESE UNITS ? ANYONE INTERESTED IN ANSI TERMINALS ? Pete Lancashire ....tektronix!tekig!petel
mark@cbhydra.uucp (07/04/84)
$1700 for a terminal whose only claim to fame is that it's ANSI 3.64 compatible isn't exactly impressive. But then I don't recall Beehive ever having terminals that were competitively priced. The ANSI X3.64 standard isn't a total solution to the problem of terminal compatibility, for a number of reasons. It specifies a fairly large set of capabilities that nobody is going to implement on a CRT, like italics, having both bold and dim, etc. So it's considered OK to subset it. But there is no standard subset, and if you pick a reasonable subset there will be lots of terminals that are missing something important (e.g. the vt100 doesn't have insert or delete line or character.) It also doesn't specify the screen size (or a way to find it out), which is important to all screen oriented programs. And it doesn't specify details like what to do at the right margin, or whether cursor addressing is screen relative or memory relative. However, there are lots of inexpensive terminals that implement all the important features. In the $500 range are the Zenith z19 and the Wyse (and I'm probably forgetting a few important ones.) If you have specific gripes about some aspect of 3.64 that you can't find in terminals claiming 3.64 compatibility, tell us about them.