kim@emory.UUCP (Kim Wallen {Psychology}) (05/05/85)
I have had a chance to use an AT&T UNIX PC for the last three days.
The version we have has 1MB ram and a 10MB hard disk, Microsoft Word
and Multiplan, and a business graphics pckage. We have used it as
a vt100 terminal to our Vax 780 running 4.2 and have connected a
second terminal and run it multi user. We did not get a chance to
use the phone manager and internal modem.
My overall feeling is that this is a very nice UNIX (tm) box. As a two
user system it has very acceptable performance, with little degradation
even when one user is doing several fscks in the background. It does
seem to be doing alot of swapping to disk, even when a singel user is
running a small task, but this may be related to how it handles disk I/O
(see the BYTE article for details). I am not particularly thrilled with
Sys V after running in a 4.2 environment, but I think alot of the problems
will disappear when ksh becomes available.
The ua (user agent) shell is a deceont attempt at a windowing environment,
but comes up short in many ways when compared to the Macintosh.
The foremost difference between the two is that the Mac screens just
look crisper and more precise. AT&T uses wide highlighted borders
which end up making the screen hard on the eyes. AT&T makes no use of
icons to speak of so the two desktops are not really comparable.
The AT&T windows have size, drag, kill, scroll, and help boxes. The
scroll boxes give no indication if more info is beyond the border. This
is a particular problem on the UNIX PC because the system will only size
windows on natural breaks. If you size a window so that it cuts through
the middle of a field the system will resize the window so that there is
a border around the text, making it appear as if you are seeing everything
in that window.
The drag and size boxes have a lag between when you click on them and
when they become active. When active the arrow cursor chages to a small
w in a box. You can move this at high speed and the drag or size box will
always end up wherever you leave the w box (window box?). If you don't
wait for the cursor to change before you start dragging then the actual
cursor location will differ from where the system thinks it is by how
far you got the cursor away from the drag box before it changed to a
w box. When you have located a new position or size it takes about
two seconds on an unloaded system before the new window is built.
This seems very slow in comparison to a 128k Mac.
On the plus side, this is a multitasking environment so something useful
can be going on in those windows and it is extremely easy to jump
from one to another. You can have as many as 9 open windows (the
system has 12 windows in /dev, but seems to say 'can't open window
when you get to 9 of yours on the screen') and you can jump back and
forth in an instant. If you are using the UNIX PC as a terminal
(as I am now) you get the full screen, but can immediately get to any
of the other open windows behind it by clicking on the 'W' icon in
the screen's upper right corner. This gives you a list of all active
windows. As long as any small piece of a window remains on the screen
you can get back to that window by clicking on it. Very fast and very
nice. At first you don't find this feature too useful because you have
no experience with that kind of jumping between tasks, but it becomes
addicting quickly. I suspect I would usually set up several commonly
used tasks in windows and not do alot of dragging and sizing during a
session, but just jump between them.
The AT&T mouse is very nice. It has a much more precise feel than the
Mac mouse and the three buttons are useful. The left button is the
enter button, the middle shows the command menu, or a specialized command
menu in specific applications, the right button is a mark/select button
and does different things in different aplications (generally it allows
you to scroll through options or to mark sections in a text or a spread
sheet). The mouse is very responsive and it is very easy to precisely
control the cursor's screen position.
The keyboard is a mixed blessing. It has a very nice feel, although it
may be too sensitive for some people's tastes. The only real booboo is
that their is a big fat Caps Lock key about where one might expect to
find the control key. The control key(s) are on either side of the
space bar. Everything else is nicely laid out. It does have lots
of special function keys, but you don't have to use them since they
are all available from onscreen menus. However as one gets more
experience they make it very easy to skip screen menus and get the job
done. There are 8 oversize function keys at the top of the keyboard
which change function within an application. They can either be
activated with the mouse or used as keys. Their function is displayed
in large lighted boxes at the screen bottom.
My main gripes with the system are that is only comes with a green screenn
(if you like green screens you'll love this one, but I hate them) and
I had hope for more from the windowing shell. On the other hand AT&T
has really put together a very powerful package. I think it will let
you do about anything you want and it does most of them very well.
The disk does whistle, but is fast and you get an overall feeling that
there are alot of available resources. The vt100 emulation is good
and hooking to another computer or adding a terminal is very simple.
My overall feeling about this machine is that if AT&T listens to customer
response and cleans up the windows this should be a really great machine
with the next software release. In the mean time I'm trying to come
up with the money (our price is $3,700 for a 1MB RAM, 20MB disk package)
to get one now. There isn't a PC that can hold a candle to it as a
single-user, multitasking machine for the money. Lets hope AT&T can
get the rest of the package worked out, they have made a very good start.
Kim Wallen
Psychology Dept.
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
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