dyer@atari.UUCP (11/21/86)
The most brain damaged terminal?
The ISC Intecolor was an 8080-based microcomputer. I used one as a
summer students at the National Bureau of Standards. The regular
staff wouldn't touch the things, naturally. The ISCs were
affectionately referred to as "the Turkey Terminals," and usually only
the first-summer students got stuck with them. (Some second-summer
students graduated to Omroms: 8008-based terminals with padding
requirements you wouldn't /believe/....)
The ISC featured the following:
o Zero-key rollover optical keyboard. You had to *completely*
release a key before pressing another one down, even a little
bit. The safest way to type on an ISC was with a pencil
eraser.
o Multi-direction cursor. The cursor could be programmed to
advance not only from left to right (as english terminals
usually do), but in any of eight directions (including
diagonals).
Thus the ISC was sensitive to almost any "noise". An errant
character would usually send it spinning off into odd corners of
the s
c
r
e
e
n
.
It was amusing trying to use a screen editor in these modes.
o Cursor addressing wouldn't work for columns and rows 13
(probably because that code is 'carriage return'....)
o Lots of escape sequences would cause it to crash. Other
escape sequences would do awful things to the screen colors,
the character blink attributes, or the fabric of space
in the immediate vicinity. I was constantly picking up
unhealthy shocks from the thing's metal keyboard.
o They were *heavy*. So much brain-damage needs a big power
supply, I guess.
I hear that ISC has since cleaned up their act. One hopes so.
--
-Landon Dyer, Atari Corp. {sun,lll-lcc,imagen}!atari!dyer
/-----------------------------------------------\
| The views represented here do not necessarily | "If Business is War, then
| reflect those of Atari Corp., or even my own. | I'm a Prisoner of Business!"
\-----------------------------------------------/m5d@bobkat.UUCP (Mike McNally ) (12/11/86)
All this talk about brain-damaged terminals has got me thinking about why I hate most terminals. Right now I'm using a Wyse 60. It has quite a bit of intelligence, including programmable character sets (fun, but almost useless), lots of emulations (useless to me on a Unix system), lots of strange block-transmit modes (useless), PC-AT keyboard emulation (bizarre, and useless), sixteen special function keys (not entirely useless; at least they're programmable), numeric keypad (useless), built-in calculator (a particularly stupid calculator), calendar, alarm clock, and ASCII chart (the stupidest ASCII chart I have ever seen). On and on and on. The keyboard is cluttered with things like "Print", "Send", "Prev/Next PAGE", "Funct" (really great: transmits ^A<key>^M, just what I needed). The intelligence has some problems, but I can forgive them. I'm a programmer. Certainly there are lots of people out there who are programmers as well. All of these people (for the sake of argument, allow me this) use terminals, and probably most of them don't use the AUX port in bidirectional mode, and don't ever press the SEND PAGE button except by accident, and get really upset when they hit the PRINT SCREEN button and have to wait for the terminal to make believe it's printing the screen (a VT100 emulator I used had this feature; the PRINT SCREEN key was conveniently located right next to the arrow keys). Are there any terminals designed such that features useless on my UNIX system (or RSTS, VMS, or whatever) can be left out entirely? Like block mode? or keyboard lock (what a good idea; lock the keyboard when a ^O is received...)? or...wait...the man who gives me the injections is back...I have to go now...no! I don't want the jacket!... I get so upset when I think about terminals. -- **** **** **** At Digital Lynx, we're almost in Garland, but not quite **** **** **** Mike McNally Digital Lynx Inc. Software (not hardware) Person Dallas TX 75243 uucp: ...convex!ctvax!bobkat!m5 (214) 238-7474
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/17/86)
> ...what a good idea; lock the keyboard when a ^O is received...
If you want a still better idea, consider one terminal that we recently
tried out (we rejected it as soon as I read the manual) which used (as
I recall) ^N and ^O to switch the terminal back and forth between XON/XOFF
and CTS/RTS handshaking!!! What incredible stupidity...
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry