casey@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom) (07/10/89)
My previous posting about the Graphon wasn't really an evaluation. It
was a product summary. I hadn't seen the Graphon at that point. I now
have one and have used it for a while. The version of the software that
came with it (1.2) wasn't very good, but Graphon emailed me updated
copies of a couple of pieces (the server and their version of xinit) and
I'm very pleased with what I've got now. There are a couple of minor
problems (like no VAX binaries and difficulty in getting source for their
server so I can recompile it on some of our weirder machines), but
they're working on them now.
My overall impression is that the company is responsive and the product
is very nice. Specific points:
General: RATING: VERY GOOD
o The whole monitor, keyboard, mouse arrangement is very attractive.
it's low profile and doesn't take up a lot of space. The monitor
tilts easily both up and down and side to side. People who object
to large keyboards will be put off - it's about 21 inches wide.
The saving graces are that it's low profile as I mentioned above
and only weighs about four pounds.
Monitor: RATING: VISUAL: FANTASTIC, SIZE: USABLE
o The monitor is wonderfully crisp. I have rarely used a monitor
which is as easy on the eyes. It comes with an anti-glare coating
which is extremely effective. The only down side is that the
display resolution is only 800x600.
Keyboard: FEEL: USABLE, SIZE: LARGE, WEIGHT: REASONABLE LOW, ERGONOMICS: GOOD
o The keyboard is a little clacky, but feel isn't bad.
o They have a very hoaky method of tilting the keyboard, but that's
borrowed directly from DEC (in fact, it looks like the keyboard
could have been manufactured by DEC from the look of it). They
have two holes on the underside that you're supposed to stick two
supplied plastic posts into to raise the back of the keyboard.
o The keyboard cord comes trailing out of the right side of the
keyboard which doesn't make any sense because the connector on
the monitor box is on the left side. However, the cord can be
pulled out of a small channel leading off to the right on the
bottom of the keyboard and pushed into a similar channel leading
off to the left with no real effort. You then have more than
enough cord to move the keyboard almost anywhere.
Keyboard layout: VERY GOOD (modulous some minor nits)
o Less than and greater than (`<' and `>') are located properly
above comma and period rather than the traditional placement on
DEC terminals between SHIFT and Z.
o There is a CAPS LOCK key (sigh) and worse yet, it's located
between the CONTROL and A keys. You can configure the CAPS LOCK
key to be a caps lock, a shift lock, or nothing, but so far that
configuration is ignored when the terminal is in X mode. I've
recommended that they add the ability to configure the key as a
control key also.
o The COMPOSE/META key is too tiny and located off to the left side
of the SHIFT key. I like the design that puts large META keys
on the left and right sides of the SPACE BAR.
o They added three keys to the top of the DEC cursor movement pad
immediately to the right of the main pad. Unfortunately they
moved the standard DEC pad down by one key to insert these three
keys instead of simply adding them at the bottom. This means
that many people who are used to going for the standard DEC keys
by position will have a hard time.
Mouse: TRACKING: EXCELLENT, FEEL: USABLE
o The mouse comes as a separate option which doesn't make sense
given the market Graphon is shooting for, but it's only $125.
The mouse also feels very light and the mechanism (two small
0.25in wheels) looks flakey, but I haven't had any problems
yet and it tracks quite nicely on a variety of surfaces.
Software: SUPPORT: EXCELLENT, X 11.3 CONFORMANCE: GOOD
o First off, it should be noted that all you really need from
Graphon is a server and a special version of xinit which they
call xgoinit. Everything else can be run right off the X 11.3
distribution. The reason they need a special version of xinit is
two fold: 1. xinit does it's best to disconnect completely from
the tty it was started from before executing the server, and 2.
xinit uses display zero as it's default. I won't go into detail
on the tty issue because I haven't studied the subtleties enough.
Leave it be that I think that there are some very subtle
interactions involved which xgoinit handles very well.
o Graphon distributes a reasonable complete chunk of the X 11.3
core distribution including client binaries, libraries, font
files, include files, server, and special version of xinit.
Since I already had X 11.3 installed, I'm not using anything
except their server and their xinit. Maybe Someone else will
choose review the quality of their distribution and installation
targeting. They're default installation directories are
/usr/bin/X11, /usr/lib/X11, /usr/include/X11, and
/usr/man/man[13].
o As mentioned above, the terminal lets you configure what you want
the CAPS LOCK key to be (CAPS LOCK, SHIFT LOCK, or nothing), but
this configuration is ignored in X mode. Strangely enough, the
terminal's configuration to swap or not swap the DELETE and
BACKSPACE keys are not ignored, but that's inconsistency for you.
If you're like me and absolutely detest CAPS LOCK, the standard
``xmodmap -e "clear lock"'' works fine, but this leads us to the
next problem ...
o The keyboard mapping stuff is very funky. Once you clear lock as
above for instance, it's impossible to add back. You can also
only add one keysym per modifier. And, every single character
code has it's own keycode! So, for instance, there are separate
keycodes for a, A, 1, and ! instead of having them show up as
unshifted and shifted aspects of one keycode. But when all is
said and done, it works well enough for me (xmodmap -e 'keysym
BackSpace = Delete' -e 'clear Lock').
o The server screen saver doesn't work in X mode. It works fine
when the terminal is used in its dumb == vt100 mode.
o Surprisingly enough, the X mode isn't as susceptible to errors on
the communications link as I thought it would be. While
operating in V.22bis (2400 BPS), I lifted the phone handset and
put it back down. Expectably, there were errors all over the
screen, but the server and the terminal resynced without any
trouble. A quick xrefresh and I was back in business.
o Since their server wasn't configured with the rest of my X 11.3,
the server couldn't find my RGB database or font files without
being told, but that only requires that I add a few extra
parameters at start up to tell it where things are.
Overall I like the product quite a bit and I think that Graphon is
serious about supporting it. They've practically bent over backwards to
make sure I'm happy with the terminal. A good example was the fact that
they were willing to email me new binaries when I had problems with the
version that came on tape.
I'm trying to convince them to release their graphics protocol to the
public domain as a base for a standards effort. So far they've indicated
guarded support for participating in a standards effort, but I can't say
where this will lead ... I'm also pushing them to offer an emulation of
their terminal for the Macintosh and other PCs. They say that they're
considering this, but just don't have the personnel resources.
Personally I think they would be better off just donating their server
to the X Consortium and concentrating on offering their terminal and
emulations of it. They have two interrelated problems in my eyes: their
small size and cracking the market. Because of their small size and
their unique approach to supporting X across low bandwidth communications
channels, people tend to look askance at them and wonder what the future
of such a product is if Graphon doesn't take a large enough share of the
market. I think if they were to donate a sample copy of their server to
the X consortium this would solve both problems: they could concentrate
on their terminal and leave server support and development to others, and
their protocol would become a de facto publicly available standard which
would immediatedly open up the market. Oh well, these are obviously just
my ramblings and it remains to be seen as to whether I can convince
Graphon of their value ...
One final comment: I'm using the Optimax 200 with a Telebit T2500. It
doesn't work very well in PEP mode because of the echo delay, but works
very nicely in V.32 mode with MNP. I can hardly wait for Telebit to
implement MNP compression so I can see if I get any improvements with
that.
Caseycasey@gauss.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom) (07/10/89)
| From: anthony zador <zador-anthony@YALE.EDU> | | How fast is the modem you're using? I have a telebit 1000, which is 9600 | baud. Might this give reasonable performance? I'm using a Telebit T2500 in V.32 mode which gives full duplex 9600 BPS performance. When Telebit implement the MNP compression, I should see even better. The problem with the Telebit T1000 is that it does 9600 BPS via Telebit's PEP protocol which is [essentially] half duplex. The echo delays are pretty annoying with PEP, but I have used it successfully. You'll just have to get used to extremely jerky window and echo response. If the Graphon becomes popular enough, who knows, maybe Telebit might be inclined to offer yet another spoofing mode ... | Also, I would like to call through a bank of modems connected to my | computer via ethernet. Does the *first* machine the Optimax talks to have | to know about its communications protocols? I have no control over the | bank of modems. No problem as long as you can configure the modem pool terminal server to offer a completely transparent 8-bit communications. If you can only get a 7-bit channel, then you'll have to run the Graphon server in 7-bit mode which is a pretty significant performance hit. If you can't get a completely transparent channel (i.e. the terminal server uses escape characters to get you into its command mode, etc.), you're going to have problems from time to time ... Note that this isn't Graphon's problem. It's the fault of inflexible terminal servers. The correct fix is to fix the terminal server. Casey