govern (12/01/82)
Can anyone tell me about the AAA terminal? How well does
it work with vi? How are the human factors aspects? Is it
well-made, or will I need constant repairs?
What options should I order for it, if any are available?
Thanks;
Bill Stewart houxf!hoscf!wcs
{harpo!hoscf!
ucbvax!ihnss!hoscf! }
BTL-WBmclure (03/09/83)
#R:houxf:-24800:sri-unix:5400001:000:11606 sri-unix!mclure Dec 2 12:08:00 1982 I have an Ambassador and have been quite pleased with it. The big win is the screen-size, extremely useful for programmers who want increased context. I don't mind the slow phosphor at all. They were having some problems with the hardware that caused it to die if turned on-and-off too frequently. Mine died. They sent a hardware person to each of the major installations to install the fix and mine has worked fine since then. I like the keyboard a lot better than most of the other keyboards I've used. I got mine for $1100. Here's the entry from INFO about it: Ann Arbor "Ambassador" Status: Supported by Twenex EMACS, ":CRTSTY AAA". Users: CPR@SRI-KL, CBF@MIT-MC Price: Compact box, $1300 single unit; bigger box, $1430 (no difference inside); compact box is designed to be carried. Bigger box is designed to be bigger. 7 terminals get you a 5% discount, 16 gets 10%, 31 gets 15%, etc. That makes 25 terminals cost $1170 each, for example (I'm referring to the cheaper box version only; it's more compact and less Captain Marvel-looking). MIT price: $1170 Screen: 60 lines max by 80 characters; P39 high-retention green phosphor; large 15" diagonal screen; very readable even at 60 lines. Has "zoom" feature, allowing 60x80, 48x80, 40x80, 36x80, 30x80, 28x80, 24x80, 20x80, 18x80 (maybe one or two more) format (it changes from non-interlaced to interlaced at some level like 36x80). At 60 and 48 lines, I think there's only one scan line between lines, which makes it seem a bit cramped, but it's still quite readable. Inverse video mode makes it more readable at high densities. Chars: 7 x 7 when more than 40 lines on screen (not sure of boundary), 9 x 9 otherwise. Keybrd: Simulated N-key rollover, good tactile feel (highly subjective, of course). (Early versions have 2-key rollover.) Detached keyboard, uses funny ribbon cable; typeamatic (*), keyclick (*) (*) = can be disabled. Typewriter-paired layout. Non-typewriter keys well-laid-out, looks somewhat like: -- function keys, local editing keys -- ESC - numerics, etc. - BREAK plus TAB -standard qertyuiop- LF BS your CTL CL - etc - RET RUB basic PAU SHFT - - SHFT UP DN keypad where CL is Caps Lock, PAU is Pause (sort of XOFF/XON toggle), and UP, DN are explained below, I think. Has 12 down-loadable shiftable function keys (for a total of 24 if I might be so bold to calculate) above the major grouping, with another 3 settable on the keypad; total function key storage: 256 bytes (to be arbitrarily distributed among the keys). The rest of the local editing keys aren't down-loadable. Speeds: all standard to 19.2KB, not splittable Has: everything; ANSI standard with extensions. Standout modes: reverse video, underlining, blinking, bold, blank, in all combinations (this is implemented by storing 12 bits for each character, so, e.g., you can't complement the screen easily---this feature should be trivial to add in hardware by XORing the high order bits during display). However, any erasing operations (such as kill to end of line) set the erased region to spaces in the current standout mode, so just setting it to reverse video and typing ^L to your editor flips the whole screen (unlike Heath's, which always kill to blanks). A crude, probably useless, form of windowing (see below). No padding requirements at 9600 baud for all functions we tried, except for screen clear. Flow control: XON/XOFF, settable, but, interestingly enough, you can download the characters that get sent for XON and XOFF (up to four for each function). Lacks: True overstriking. Misfeatures: The keyboard is not a true N-key rollover. Due to the hardware scanning technique, there are certain simultaneous combinations which are ambiguous; however they seem extremely obscure. P39 phosphor is VERY high-retention and thus scrolling is too streaky for words. Some have also complained that the characters are too "fuzzy". Vendor: Ann Arbor Terminals, Inc., 6175 Jackson Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48103. 313-663-8000. 10 sales regions, Boston area rep is Digital Sales Assoc's, 9 Spring Street, Waltham, 617-899-4300 (ask for Art Dempsey). See below for service information. It's a full ANSI-standard terminal, driven by a 4MHz Z80, with a battery- backed-up CMOS memory inside to store settings; it has a VT100-like "setup" mode, with 4 separate mode groups to deal with. The 15-inch screen is truly nice; even at 48 lines, it doesn't look too cramped; it does look extremely wide. At 60 lines, it's a matter of taste whether it's readable or not. [A feature on the new models is the ability to store a powerup sequence of some 200 chars in the non-volatile memory. This can be used to load the function keys and the terminal answerback.] It has full print and copy features through an auxiliary port, if you're interested in that kind of thing. It has block mode sending, etc. They actually seem to have done it right, e.g., you can have nearly all flavors of printing and copying happening through the printer port, which operates asynchronously at any speed. The screen format is pretty interesting: it's always 80 characters wide, but as you step down from 60 to 48 to 40 to 28 to 24 to 18 (or some such sequence, I forget), the lines get farther apart and the characters get slightly bigger (they use two dot matrices: a 9x9 and a 7x7). The UP and DOWN keys next to the right SHIFT key are used in conjunction with CTRL to shift the window (locally) up and down a line or to zoom out and in when CTRLified (the host can also zoom). Don't know how useful this is or how confusing it might get if you somehow zoom around by mistake. It has some notion of 3 "screen areas" which are totally settable; they refer to them as the "upper host area", "middle operator area" and "lower host area"; I suppose they're useful in some kind of special application mode. It does appear that you can position the "operator" (middle) area and use insert/delete line to do pretty much arbitrary region scrolling like the VT100. However, since it has insert/delete line, it is probably not worth doing region scrolling that way. Nearly everything is settable from either the keyboard (in setup mode) or from the other side of the communications line (e.g., a host machine). It has a few interesting features, such as Push and Pop Line, which let you shove any number of lines down to the bottom of the screen (remember, all 60 lines are considered part of the screen), or pull them back up to any point; I suppose this can be used as a way of moving lines around on the screen arbitrarily by pushing them to the bottom from a cursor position, moving somewhere else and popping them back. It has an erase-character-under-cursor feature just like ITS loves. Seems to have a "justifying tab" (?) You can push and pop the cursor position, like on the H19, which is pretty useful if you don't want to remember where you were but want to get back there later (e.g., mode line hacking). At 9600 baud, it seemed to need NO PADDING for even the hairiest "insert n lines" functions, which makes it another first; even the hardwired DM2500 requires some padding for insert/delete line. [Later, when adding Twenex EMACS support, we found it needed some 2-400 ms of padding or waiting for a full screen clear.] It can go at up to 19.2Kb; it'd be interesting to see what it looks like at that speed. (One interesting psychological fact: at 9600 baud, 60 lines on the screen, full-screen refresh looks a lot slower than on standard terminals, for obvious reasons.) [For outputting simple text, including letting the terminal scroll, I could not get it to lose even at 19200 baud. -CBF] Ann Arbor has always had a reputation of building sturdy products. They've gotten a somewhat black name from places that bought custom terminals, such as BBN, and modified them even further; AA could never keep up the documentation for over 50 different versions of TTL logic boards; they claim it'll be different this time, since they aren't customizing the Ambassador. The hardware "theory of operations" manual looks reasonable. The Ambassador in the "E" has only one CPU board (piggybacked by a smaller board) and one power supply/CRT electronics board), and their early-life failure rate is claimed to be very low (they burn them in at 50 degrees Celsius for a week). They only have self-maintenance, which helps explain why their overhead is so low and they can keep their prices down. The current service theory is that you return a bad card (or whole unit if you're stumped) and they will return it within 5 days, fixed, for "usually less than $100 per card or $200 per terminal". You can also get 24-hour turnaround if you're willing to pay a $200 premium. If you buy more than a few terminals (10, say) they will give you a free, full-day maintenance training session (you get to fly to Ann Arbor, of course). They have an extended year's warrantee which costs $130 per terminal and which covers any repair costs for the first year of life. The keyboard feels quite sturdy and everything is housed in metal casing; the smaller-box version is rather compact and both the terminal and the keyboard are housed in lightweight, very sturdy plastic cases. I don't know how the keyboards themselves they'd hold up under heavy abuse, but I will wager they're not as fragile as VT100s. (The keyboard cable is a flat ribbon, fairly durable-looking frob, but it's raised some eyebrows of people who've seen it.) I pinned them down on the question of keyboard scanning, seeing the way that Teleray lost initially with the T10's, and they said the keyboard was scanned 100 times a second, with interrupts off, so there was no possibility of losing typed characters due to high screen activity. They said they hadn't heard of n-key rollover (sigh) until recently, and that it wouldn't be possible until the second version of the Ambassador (but at least they admitted it was a good thing). Still, with 2-key rollover, it isn't awful. [I had no complaints about the keyboard, but I don't touch type - EBM.] As far as ucode fix distribution goes, they're willing to send new PROMs if you find gross bugs that prevent you from doing your job with the terminal. It's not clear what happens with bugs of the form "when you print 8 asterisks, backspace 3 times, sneeze, and then go into inverse video mode, the screen glitches"; they will probably not send out PROMs for such obscure problems. They only come with a P39 phosphor, which is a very green, high-retention phosphor; this means it blurs and streaks quite a bit when scrolling; at MIT-EECS, we run them in wrap mode so they don't scroll, but this is a local Twenex feature only. Rand Corporation, which evaluated them, has complained about a particularly bad 15KHz whine which bothered their secretaries (one of the students at MIT complained about it, too); Ann Arbor claims they've fixed that. [Latest update: the whine is still noticeable.] All in all, looks like a nearly-complete win if you want the screen size, balanced by the blurring and keyboard lossages. --CPR, EBM, Saturday, 13 September 1980 Wednesday, 1 October 1980 Thursday, 11 December 1980 (after three weeks using them) The marketing manager (Sarah Freeman of Ann Arbor) is now quoting 12 week delivery on a version including N-key rollover and an option to have the PAUSE key act as a Meta key (ie. 8th bit shift). --CBF 8 April 1981 I got it and it works. -CBF 9 September 1981
thomas (03/14/83)
A small update on the AAA entry: A very large number of keys are now down-loadable, including the entire keypad, all the keys on the top row except two, tab(!), return(!!), and some others. The loading sequence allows you to specify whether a key is local only, send only, or both(? I think), and whether it should auto-repeat. For example, the return key does not auto-repeat by default, so if you want it to, you need to reload it. I guess for Unix work, you could load it with '\n'. Also, they now have a version with a white phosphor. It has a small amount of flicker in the interlaced mode (above 30 lines) which is objectionable to some, but not others. It does not, however, smear. =Spencer