UNITERM TEK MODE

K538915@CZHRZU1A.BITNET (09/14/86)

Swiss Data - Rumours

This morning I visited the local computer exhibition Swiss Data in Basel.
What I actually saw on the stand of the ATARI general distributor SAMA was
            - a sign announcing the 2080 STf (I'm not quite sure about the
              STf bit) with 2 MByte RAM,
            - a sign announcing the 4160 STf with 4 MByte RAM,
            - a demonstration of a 1040 with blitter chip against
              a 1040 without,
            - a prototype of the MS-DOS/IBM-PC emulator running Multiplan.
Being rather suprised seeing all this and ATARI USA being rather quite
about future products I got hold of the senior salesman there and asked him
a few questions (this is not a quote, just a summary of our talk!):

   When will the 2080/4160 be avaiable?  End of the year/next spring together
                                         with a laser printer.
                                         Packet price < 10000 SFr.

  (The idea seems to be that the laser printer will not have its own controller

   but will use the ST -> that's the reason for all that memory).

   When will the blitter chip be avaiable?  Real soon now.

   (It seems the first batch of blitters had a design fault and the chip had to

   be redesigned, the one I saw was supposedly a new one, it worked ok as far
   as I could see)

   Will old 520/1040 ST's be upgradeable somehow? Perhaps.

I couldn't check the MS-DOS emulator out, since the only program they had
was MulitPlan and that looked ok. The blitter chip did seem to speed up
graphics quite a lot, but I didn't see any demonstration of plain text or a
real commercial program.

II Receiving Mail on IBM mainframes - Moshe Braner's letter

Moshe is quite right about receivng mail on IBM mainframes, I always get a
personal copy of any mail from a SIG on my virtual card reader (this is
using VM/CMS, I get nightmares thinking about getting mail with MVS).The
only resonable way to read mail is to use a fullscreen terminal and RLIST,
but all operations (discarding, receiving etc.) on any files are very very
permanent (see next part III of this letter).

III Pascal vs. C

I'm sorry I don't know who actually wrote the original letter ( I accidently
discarded it , see part II of this letter), but in one of the last postings
somebody claimed that Pascal is more restricting than C. Sorry but that is
called in German "Aepfel mit Birnen vergleichen", C is NOT a high
level language, Pascal is! A high level language with strong typing and no
access to low level facilities will always be more 'restricting' than
an assembler or C. Choose the correct language for the job you want to do
(this doesn't mean I would choose C to do ANYTHING) and don't forget the
time you gain thru not being 'restricted' by Pascal will be lost debugging your

C program.
If you wan't to compare C to an other language compare it to Modula II.
I'm sure there are not many things you can do in C you can't do in Modula II
and you have the advantages of a low level language combined with a high level
one.

IV UniTerm - Problems with Tek mode

All those people which have trouble with the Tek mode of UniTerm, try
starting out from the Tek4010 mode (I've changed the switching logic
in the new version), if the problems are still there, use filecapture
to collect the sequence which is causing trouble and send it to me.


                 Simon Poole
                 K538915@CZHRZU1A.BITNET

jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (09/14/86)

I would love to see the reaction of some of you language experts to OSS's
ACTION! for the Atari 8-bitters.  It is structured, but reputedly so close to
as fast as Assembly language as makes the difference not terribly significant.
And it compiles faster than anything else known to Man (or Woman, for those
who choose not to topologically identify the two lexical items for this
purpose).

If we are REALLY lucky, maybe OSS will come out with an ACTION! compiler for
the ST.  Then maybe the DoD will select it to replace ADA!!!

(P.S. - in English the idiom is "comparing Apples and Oranges", but personally
the pears sound tastier anyway.)

-John Sangster
jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa

Felton.pa@XEROX.COM (09/15/86)

> If we are REALLY lucky, maybe OSS will come out with an ACTION!
compiler 
> for the ST.

	Six months to a year ago I sent a message to Clint Parker (the author
of ACTION!) complementing him on his execellent language. He replied
that he was working on a version for the ST. Let's hope that he actually
finishes it.


John