mats@dual.UUCP (Mats Wichmann) (06/02/84)
I posted my request for terminals with more than 24 lines becuase I
was getting somewhat tired of being able to display so little stuff
on one screen. For example, I was thinking of being able to edit two
files and see context in both files (rather than 10 lines each...),
that sort of things. The response was not overwhelming, and I heard
nothing about a couple of terminals I had heard about quite a while
ago - Piiceon and Corvus. I had actually seen both of these terminals
more than a year ago, but they seem to have vanished....
Here's what I did find out:
Delta Data has a 28 line terminal. Is claimed to be easy to work with.
The BLIT/TTY 5620, is 77 lines x 88 columns. Most of you know about the
BLIT already; it is really not especially useful without the software
package which is rather expensive. It also has, apparently like all the
Teletype terminals, fairly long persistence phosphor - something I
always found aggravating in a terminal.
Microterm makes a 66 line, 80 column ANSI terminal (model Ergo 4000).
One of the respondents who mentioned this terminal says the characters
were VERY difficult to read. The other said it was `real good for
doing wordprocessing'.
C-ITOH makes a 66 line, 80 column ANSI terminal. Opinions were mixed
on this one as well; they have some effort into targeting it for
office use, and there was some question if it were comfortable for
programmers to use (apparently, the ESC key is a shifted function key!).
Ann Arbor has a 60 line terminal (the Ambassador); I did not get a clear
line on whether any of their other terminals (Guru?) were 60 line also.
After some initial responses, I got a very nice call from Mark Willaby
from Ann Arbor, and we had a chat about the Ambassador terminal. It appears
from this conversation that the Ambassador has always been targeted towards
programmers and scientists; they have done things to make using EMACS easier;
and the terminal is (claimed) capable of accepting characters at 19.2 kbaud
without any flow control (many people commented on the slowness of
redrawing a 60 line sceen in, say, VI). This sounded attractive enough
that I am going to try to get an evaluation unit of one for a while.
Conclusions: there is not nearly as much activity in this area as I had
thought. Of the available terminals, only two, Ann Arbor and the BLIT,
seem targeted towards programmers; the others (Delta Data, Microterm,
C Itoh, and presumably the two I know about but didn't hear about,
Corvus and Piiceon) are targeted towards the business (especially
word processing) market. My question is, when all of these window manager
packages really start catching on, who is going to want to run 4 windows
on a 24 line x 80 column screen? Are you listening, terminal manufacturers?
[ Sincere thanks to all who responded to my query ]
Mats Wichmann
Dual Systems Corp.
...{ucbvax,amd70,ihnp4,cbosgd,decwrl,fortune}!dual!matsmark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (06/03/84)
The Ambassador actually does require some padding at 19200 baud, even a little at 9600. However, it uses Xon/Xoff, so unless you are running EMACS without flow control you'll never notice it; since it requires similar padding to the HP 2621 (e.g. almost none). Yes, it takes forever to redraw the 60 line screen. Not because the terminal is slow, but because it takes a long time to transmit 60 lines worth of text from a serial port. The only padding needed on this operation is 156ms on the clear screen sequence. It would take as long on any other 60 line terminal. The Ambassador comes in landscape mode by default. If you want to run it with 60 lines, you should order it in portrait mode. The Guru has a number of different screen sizes, including the default 33x80, 44x80, 76x89, 76x134, and 76x178. Yes, that's right, you can get a 76x178 table all on the screen at once. The print is so tiny you'll go blind trying to read it, but it's great for looking at the overall shape of things. The Guru is only available in landscape mode, last time I checked, so you probably don't want to use it with more than about 44 lines for everyday use. The Guru and the Ambassador also have green phosphor, although different from the Blit. The Ambassador has a slow phosphor, resulting in noticable ghosting. (I run mine in reverse video and the problem goes away.) The Guru has a faster phosphor, it's easy to look at in regular video, but it flickers in reverse video mode. You can get an Ambassador with white phosphor, it's called a Genie and the major difference is that it won't put more than 30 lines on the screen. It also costs less and is missing a few features. Mark