lcc.jbrown@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA (Jordan Brown) (04/19/85)
The 7300 is a kinda neat machine; I keep being tempted to buy one. It's not terribly fast to watch - terminal I/O ranges from ~60cps for stupid programs that do single char writes to maybe 2000cps if you write big lines. (these are not measurements; they are guesses - I'm assuming my 750 was really sending at 9600 baud and then comparing that with the 7300) I think it needs more than the base 512k - I believe it was swapping a lot. Their windowing shell is interesting - I wouldn't want to use it for any length of time, but it is occasionally useful - it has a menu-driven interface to L.sys, for one thing. They do not include a windowing shell for programmers (theirs is targetted to compete with Macintoshes, which it does badly). However, I thought about it for a couple minutes and wrote a small program (initially ~20 lines, eventually grew to ~40-50) which would run a specified command in a window, detaching from the original window so that your shell continues. You can then get some semblance of job control, with virtual terminals. (In fact, I think you *could* start multiple gettys on the console, but I know of no reason to) There are bitmap graphics which I know little about except that there are raster primitives and GSS available. They have a business graphics application. The mouse response is lousy, I believe because it is waking up the process fairly often to do things. I strongly prefer to use the keyboard equivalents rather than the mouse, and I'm usually a mouse fan. dBASE III, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Basic are available for it; I don't know what others. I'd be interested in other people's comments.