rs4u+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Richard Siegel) (08/13/87)
IBM was on the field yesterday, showing off the new Personal System/2 line.
I went to see these machines, and here are my reactions:
I looked mostly at the PS/2 model 80; that's the big 80386-based
machine. This particular one had the case open so we could look inside.
Hardware-wise, the machine seems quite well-built; there's lots of heavy
metal shielding (Def Leppard fans please take note), big knobs to secure
the hard disks, and the motherboard is almost totally surface-mount.
Very nice-looking.
Unfortunately, there wasn't any software running on the '80; just
a slide-show type demo. The colors seemed OK. I asked about color resolution,
and the IBM rep told me that it was 640 by 480 in the 16-color mode,
and 320 by 240 in the 256-color mode. (Is that right?) That's
pretty sorry when compared to the Mac II, wwhere you don't lose
screen resolution as the number of colors increases; it's always 640 by 480.
The graphics quality was adequate; IBM seems fixated on the older
style of character display; that is, white or light-colored characters
on a black or dark-colored background; I've found that the black-on white
style used by the Macintosh and some other workstations is in the
long run easier to read and easier on the eyes. The characters were shaped
rather crudely, in my opinion.
They also had a PS/2 model 50 with the IBM Personal Pageprinter
(a 300dpi laser printer), an image scanner, and running Aldus Pagemaker
under Microsoft Windows. The laser printer uses the Ricoh engine; I
didn't see it print, but I did see some output, and I noticed the
lack of bitmap smoothing that the LaserWriter provides; scanned images
are definitely not as clear. Still, the printer is fairly fast, and
is PostScript compatible.
PC Pagemaker was disappointing. The graphics were nowhere near
as clear and easy to read as on the Macintosh, and performance was
much slower. Still it looked identical to PageMaker on the Mac, and
Pagemaker is a fairly nice program. But I did miss the Desk Accessories.
They didn't have OS/2, just DOS 3.3, which I didn't look at. DOS
is DOS to me...
--Rich
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