pjd@cwruecmp.UUCP (dr. funk) (08/07/85)
At long last my fingers have finally been laid upon an ST. It was
a color machine on display at an electronic specialty store called
"Games and Gadgets" in a local mall. (Since I hate malls, this was
clearly a special occasion.)
The quality of the color display was much better than my expectations.
One of our friends remarked "Gee, if I had bought a Mac for $2,500,
I'd be PO'd." Needless to say, we were favorably impressed.
I'd like to offer a few comments which have NOT appeared here before.
1. The space bar suffers from the same problem as the 130XE. There
is only one key switch and if you are not careful about where
you hit the bar, you may not get a space.
2. The mechanical mouse felt good and GEM/TOS tracks it quite well.
Hopefully, some vendor will produce an optical mouse just 'cuz
I hate anything mechanical.
3. Drop down menus can be a pain if your muscle memory is not tuned
to the mouse and its scaling. You will sometimes get a menu bar
when your trying to hit an icon or window corner.
4. A few desktop applications (e.g. calculator) were missing. The
VT52 emulator was present. The terminal software as shipped
->cannot<- select 2400 baud as an option.
5. There did not appear to be a way to drop into TOS command mode
from GEM. One CompuServe user reported that a COMMAND.PRG shell
file is required and that file is only available with the
Atari software development package.
The LOGO was -> quite <- nice. (We are LOGO fanatics around here, but
that could be attributed to terminal burn-out.) It will give you
three windows: text commands, debug and graphics. The debug window
looked pretty handy and is there to give you trace information.
I understand all the standard rationalizations about BASIC, but if
you convince yourself that LOGO is LISP (and it is!) then you can
have tons of fun (without counting ()'s. :-)
All in all, I can't wait until my machine shows up......
pj drongowski
case western reserve university
cleveland
--
paul drongowski decvax!cwruecmp!pjd
case western reserve university pjd%Case@CSNet-relay