raj@blanche.ics.uci.edu (Richard A. Johnson) (02/15/89)
We recently picked up one of the NCD-16 X Windowing terminals (the one which was at the Usenix in San Diego in case you know the one to which I'm referring) for a 1 week evaluation. (We would have liked to keep it longer but these things are really in demand and NCD doesn't have too many of them as yet. (We got serial number 50 or so! Something like that.) I thought I'd give everyone our impressions of it. General description: -------------------- 16 inch black and white square non-interlaced monitor. Resolution of 1024 x 1024. IBM-PC style keyboard layout. .5 - 4.5 Mb of memory (using SIMs) There are 4 SIM slots in the base. The unit has .5 Mb with nothing installed in these slots. You can put in 256K SIMs or 1Mb SIMs. (Are other size SIMs available? I don't use Macs so I don't know too much about SIMs really.) (Our unit had 1.5 Mb using 256K SIMs. We wish we had some 1Mb SIMs to try it with, but I couldn't find any at the time.) Software is at rev. 3 of X11. (Visual is currently in Beta testing of Rev. 3.) Supports thick and thin ethernet plus SLIP. Good points: ------------ The 16 inch screen is a LOT better than the small 14 inch Visual one. Also the non-interlaced monitor doesn't flicker like the Visual screen does. (This "flicker" is really evident if you use "twm". The header bars when you're focused on a window are really bothersome on the Visual, but are nice and clean on the NCD-16.) The pixels are closer together on the NCD and thus pictures appear sharper. The keyboard feels rather nice. I liked it a lot better than the Visual keyboard. (And MOST keyboards are better than a Sun, so that was no competition! :-) ) Setup and use was very straight forward. If you know enough about networking to set something like this up, then you can figure out how to do it easily. (By the way, we didn't have a manual, but we set it up with no problems.) The NCD system has a special graphic processor. This was really evident to me when I ran "texx" and panned around the zoomed image. On a Sun this flickers so badly that it's a really pain in the !@#$%, but on the NCD it was really smooth and fast. A few orders of magnitude improvement! Honest! The hardware has a little network activity light. It was nice when wondering why something (like getting a font) was taking so long. Bad points: ----------- It doesn't have NFS access for font files. It uses TFTP. This seems slower than the Visual using NFS. They said they will shortly have NFS (another month or so). Apparently you can't have more than around 20 or so TCP connections at once. This was a problem for us (the support staff), but probably wouldn't be one for general users. They said they could increase the limit and asked what was a good number. I told them 50 or so at least, but closer to 100 would be even better. It doesn't support compressed fonts. I haven't told them about this yet. I'll report back on their response when I do. We found 1 minor bug and 1 major one: 1) Minor: "xset fp" seems to do one of two things; both wrong. Sometimes it will set the font path to "(none)". This results in all font manipulations failing making the terminal unusable. Sometimes it simply "bombs" the system in such a way that it tells you push a letter to affect a system reboot. Both of these are bad, but you can avoid them by simply explicitly resetting the same font path. I haven't told them about this one either. I'll let you know. 2) Major: Sometimes the whole system just "locks up". When this happens the little network monitoring light stays on constantly and no mouse buttons or keyboard input works. The system still tracks the mouse but that's all. Killing X programs doing output on the system doesn't have any effect. They said they haven't seen this but they'll take note of it and see what can be done. Summary: -------- If I could get one in my office right now, I'd gladly give up my Sun 3/50! The increase in speed of the unit more than makes up for the lack of real estate in my opinion. Others in our support group feel the same way. We'll probably order a few of them, however we'll have an agreement with them first that we continue getting free software updates until they support NFS, have fixed all of the bugs we found, and maybe until they support compressed fonts. They're worth checking into. Definitely. By the way, I was told they plan a larger (19 inch) unit later this year (but who doesn't? 8^) ). Phone contacts: Main number for NCD: (415) 694-0650 I talked to Judy Estrin, who refered me to Janak Pathak, the sales manager. I hope this long message has been of some help to someone... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard A. Johnson raj@ics.uci.edu (Internet) UCI ICS Assistant Support Manager ucbvax!ucivax!raj (UUCP) Postmaster / Network Services raj@tertius.ics.uci.edu (via Nameservers)