rgc@wam.umd.edu (Ross Garrett Cutler) (08/10/90)
Cary E. Burnette <kerm@mcnc.org> writes > >Hello: >there was a short mention of the VT1200 in the Aug. 6th Digital News rag, >it said they would be official announced tommorow (I guess that means today, >Aug 7). >Specs are: 200 percent speed-up over the VT1000's, new server software in >the ROM's. 2 Meg. base RAM instead of 1 Meg. They also mentioned higher >resolution on the monitors, I don't know if that is for the base model >or an option???? Same list price as the VT1000's >Hope this helps I've also heard about the higher res. monitors (100 dpi). And the base model comes with 2 MB RAM standard. -- Please email -- I'll summarize. Ross Cutler University of Maryland, College Park Internet: rgc@wam.umd.edu
cleary@husc9.harvard.edu (Kenneth Cleary) (08/12/90)
After the hours of work lost due to VT1000 crashes, I'll be interested to see how the VT1200 performs. More interesting still, the VT1300 or VT2000, or whatever they call it. It is supposed to be a stripped-down VAX running VAXeln. This is not a diskless workstation. It is just one VAX chip dedicated to being an X server. They just better not try putting in the same chip as in the VAX 2000 series. Unless it has the 3800 series chip, it won't be much better than the VT1000 (or the VS2000) Even if it has that color tube, a $6000-$7000 price tag won't be justified for an over-glorified VS2000. If they do use the 3800 chip, then that 3.8 VUPS will be worth about an 11MIPS RISC chip. :-) [Comparing a VS3100/38 with a DS2100: the VS is a bit slower for some DECW actions, but it is satisfactorily competitive, even with running VMS.] For this price range, you might arrange for a diskless DS2100, but then all those MIPS are useless, when spending all your time paging. Though I was only using unofficial benchmarking programs, like muncher and maze, performance did not seem to matter whether I ran the CLIENT on a VAX8550(6 VUPS) or a DECsystem5400(16 MIPS). Performance seemed to depend more on the display device. VT1000 was slowest. A local-paging VS3100/38 w/16MB was better, and roughly equivalent to a Tektronix XN7. A local- paging DS2100 was a little better still. As soon as you iconify those maze & muncher & plaid windows, watch CPU usage climb to 90%, since the drawing bottleneck is removed :-) Client & server were running on different CPU's, and those cases with both on same, did not seem to make a big difference. Finally, the VT1000 was beta test, no question in my mind. It certainly has some advantages over other devices, if they can just make it what it promises to be. I've grown to love its features. Now, just get rid of those bugs! Plan on figuring out BDF-to-SNF conversion or whatever you need to do if you buy a non-DEC server, and need to make sure you have all the MIT fonts (not to mention font-alias files). A certain other manufacturer shipped only a partial set of fonts, and I did not find out until I tried running DECWindows apps that tried calling standard fonts. The ones that did run looked like SH*T. Others just crashed. No such problems with the VT1000, and it had no problem displaying non-DEC apps running on both UNIX & VMS concurrently. DEC has done good integration...