mike@ists.yorku.ca (Mike Clarkson) (09/26/88)
I've heard that Wyse may be planning to introduce an X-Windows terminal with built-in Ethernet soon. Costs around $3000. Does anyone have any information on this ? Mike Clarkson mike@ists.UUCP Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science mike@ists.yorku.ca York University, North York, Ontario, uunet!mnetor!yunexus!ists!mike CANADA M3J 1P3 +1 (416) 736-5611
casey@admin.cognet.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom) (09/28/88)
In article <215@ists> mike@ists.yorku.ca (Mike Clarkson) writes: > I've heard that Wyse may be planning to introduce an X-Windows terminal > with built-in Ethernet soon. Costs around $3000. Does anyone have any > information on this ? I've heard rumors of some X terminals also and likewise would be interested in any solid reports. However, they better come in under $3K or they're looking at a product that just isn't going to sell. (Any manufacturers listening?) $3K is just too close to the price of certain work stations, and with the possibility of being able to run X on your favorite PC just seemingly around the corner ... I would say that for a product like an X terminal to succeed, it would have to come in at $1500 or below. (Well under the price of your favorite PC/workstation + X package.) This price may well be impossible to hit given the amount of hardware needed for such a beast. Casey
milliken@bbn.com (Walter Milliken) (09/28/88)
In article <16248@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, casey@admin (Casey Leedom) writes: >In article <215@ists> mike@ists.yorku.ca (Mike Clarkson) writes: >> I've heard that Wyse may be planning to introduce an X-Windows terminal >> with built-in Ethernet soon. Costs around $3000. Does anyone have any >> information on this ? > > I've heard rumors of some X terminals also and likewise would be >interested in any solid reports. However, they better come in under $3K >or they're looking at a product that just isn't going to sell. (Any >manufacturers listening?) I don't know anything about a Wyse terminal, but Visual just gave us a demo yesterday. Their terminal lists for $1995, and looks fairly good. It did evidence a few minor display bugs, however. They have a rather nice way of handling fonts (it can get them through NFS or a special font server they supply to run under Unix). The screen is a bit small (14", 1024x800), and they currently use an interlaced monitor, which flickers visibly with some bitmaps. Performance is better than a Sun 3/50 running the souped-up R2 server (maybe twice as fast) -- not amazingly fast, but good enough to be usable. The terminal can run over SLIP (up to 38kbaud) as well as thin- and thick-wire Ethernet. The terminal can also run as a conventional VT100-style ASCII terminal running TCP/IP telnet over the Ethernet. The Visual people said a new software release was in the works, and that they would shortly have a non-interlaced monitor version of the terminal (which I would definitely prefer). If the next software release fixes the few bugs I saw, I'd say this terminal is a good buy. It's not quite like having a Sun 3/50-sized screen, but it should be reasonable as an X server for the cost-conscious. ---Walter
pda@stiatl.UUCP (Paul Anderson) (09/29/88)
In article <16248@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> casey@cs.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom) writes: >In article <215@ists> mike@ists.yorku.ca (Mike Clarkson) writes: >> I've heard that Wyse may be planning to introduce an X-Windows terminal >> with built-in Ethernet soon. Costs around $3000. Does anyone have any >> information on this ? > ... > $3K is just too close to the price of certain work stations, and with >the possibility of being able to run X on your favorite PC just seemingly >around the corner ... Ummm... this is an interesting point. Here at Sales Technologies, we have a number of people all equipped with PC's and mice and EGAs... We are going to be getting into X in a big way during the next year. We also have Phil Karn's source for his PC TCP/IP package and GSS drivers for EGA's. (If you don't know the name, Mr. Karn can be found frequenting the ham-radio.packet group. The TCP code is used in Amateur Radio Packet Networks.) I suspect that a long weekend hack (or 3) is going to result in a PC-XTerminal. As a (usenet) group, we are probably far closer to having an XTerminal than industrial sources are. The big and only question that I have is "Can I get it to fit in 640k?" (The classic 10 pounds of guana (no offense intended) in a 6 pound bag] :-) :-) -- Paul Anderson decvax!gatech!stiatl!pda Sales Technologies, Inc 3399 Peachtree Rd, NE X isn't just an adventure, Atlanta, GA (404) 841-4000 X is a way of life...
dob@xpiinc.UU.NET (David O. Bundy) (09/30/88)
In article <30215@bbn.COM> milliken@bbn.com (Walter Milliken) writes: >I don't know anything about a Wyse terminal, but Visual just gave us a >demo yesterday. Their terminal lists for $1995, and looks fairly >good. It did evidence a few minor display bugs, however. They have a >rather nice way of handling fonts (it can get them through NFS or a >special font server they supply to run under Unix)....... > >---Walter I thought I should reply to clarify the current state of visual's X-terminal. It is officially called the "Visual 640 X Display Station" or as we call it the XDS. Just so you know who the following comments are comming from I am the project leader for the software development of the XDS for visual. This is not a sell pitch put just meant to clarify the position of the software being discussed. We are currently in the BETA phase cycle for the 640 XDS. We have been showing it since Atlanta COMDEX in May. We were also at USENIX, UniForum, and X'hibition. We have been going through a rigorous BETA test phase connecting it to many vendors machines (DEC, IBM, SUN, MIPS, Sequent, HP, Apollo, Encore ......) and running many different applications (Torch, Uniware and Non Standard Logics at X'hibition). The XDS's internal values for the colors white and black are opposite than the majority of machines running X and this shows up problems with applications that don't deal with white and black correctly (eg. using functions like XOR on black and white give undeterministic results). These are the kinds of problems we have seen with the BETA phase with little or none with our server. We have more releases before we end our BETA phase in November and will have fixed any incompatibilities in our server by then and will be fully X.V11R3 compatible (we are currently X.V11R2++). This product is meant to be the lowest cost X server platform with the screen density (1024 x 800), performance, and memory (1-4 meg) that people need to run X. The pricing will fit it in the recommended range between existing terminals and diskless workstations/PC's. For more information about this product or future products you should contact: VISUAL Technology 1703 Middlesex St. Lowell, MA 01851 (506) 459-4903 1-800-VISUAL-C Dave
ronc@fai.UUCP (Ronald O. Christian) (10/08/88)
In article <16248@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> casey@cs.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom) writes: > $3K is just too close to the price of certain work stations, and with >the possibility of being able to run X on your favorite PC just seemingly >around the corner ... Well, you can buy an X server for PC-DOS now from Locus... They'll have to do some more work on it, though, before it becomes really usable. The problem is, you need a couple-thousand-dollar PC (and probably an $500-600 ethernet card), which, if you don't happen to *have* a PC, makes an X terminal pretty attractive. Ron -- Ronald O. Christian (Fujitsu America Inc., San Jose, Calif.) {amdahl, pyramid, sun, unisoft, uunet}!fai!ronc -or- ronc@fai.com Calling all Fujitsu Usenet sites! Contact fai!ronc or ronc@fai.com to establish uucp connection.