mjs@j.cc.purdue.edu (Mike Spitzer) (12/13/86)
I have an opportunity to buy a Hewlett Packard 2621 (actually a HP 2621P-K45) for a very reasonable price, and I was wondering what kind of experiences people have had with this terminal. How good of a terminal is this for talking to Unix? Any problems with vi or other screen related programs? Can anyone give me some information about this terminal? Thanks, Mike Spitzer Purdue University Computing Center mjs@j.cc.purdue.edu (ARPANET) pur-ee!j.cc.purdue.edu!mjs (UUCP)
andrew@hammer.TEK.COM (Andrew Klossner) (12/22/86)
[The old story: I tried replying with mail and the network slimed me, so I'm entrusting the message to news.] I have an HP2621A (like the 'P' but with no printer). It's an excellent terminal for Unix use; it has insert/delete line/character so it's good with slow-speed modems, it doesn't need to do any handshaking at 9600 baud, and the extra page of scrollable memory is very nice. The things I don't like are: -- Power up condition is with no tabs set. Every ^I sends the cursor to the beginning of the next line. Don't "stty tabs" until you have "tset", and be sure that your termcap sets up the tabs. -- The caps lock key is in an awkward place, and you can't tell by examination whether it's on or off -- no LED, no detented position. It takes a while to quit hitting it when searching for the CONTROL key. -- You'll hate it if you hit RUBOUT a lot. It's shift-ESCAPE. If I had it to do over, I would buy it again. Rock solid; in four years I've only had to replace a keyboard encoder chip. HP parts supply was responsive. (There's a sales office across the street from where I work.) I used to work at a place with lots of 'A's and 'P's. The printers were not very useful and the paper is expensive. But you can use a 'P' as a terminal, ignore the printer, and still win. I have an improved termcap (better than 4.2BSD); if you buy the terminal, let me know and I'll forward it. -=- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew) [UUCP] (tekecs!andrew.tektronix@csnet-relay) [ARPA]