Sherry.HENR@PARC-MAXC@sri-unix (10/23/82)
After working on a variety of systems, I have noticed that the type of SYSTEM and the way it is being being used determines the terminal requirements. I have encountered four types of systems so far. WorkStations: (i.e. alto, star) These sytems are not designed to have a normal terminal and you CANT attach a hardcopy terminal to them. Fortuantely, they usually have large screens that can hold a lot of inforamtion, and they do have provisions for printing many things. We have found that the large amount of information on the screen can be confusing, and the rapid display rate actually rushes the viewer. We have also noticed a LOT of our people working on altos printing their mail and taking it home instead of reading it on the screen and deleting it. I speculate that this is because we do not have the time to read all of our mail at work, and we do not have workstations at home to read it on. Treating-the-screen-as-an-electronic-punchcard-systems: These systems are designed for hardcopy terminals and make very little use of CRT based functions (such as backspace deleting and screen editing). An example of such a system is CP-V on our SDS Sigma Mainframes. Since the system wasn't really designed for CRT type terminals, few of the utilities in the system are intended to be used by a system that can not remember everything you typed, and you end up having to write everything down. For example, if you batch a job with a job file called J:MYJOB, it will respond with something like `JOB 31 ENTERED'. All references to the job from now on MUST use that number, and when the job finally prints out on the lineprinter, its ID is that number, NOT the job file name. Thus, a printing terminal is called for. Screen Oriented Systems: Many such systems are designed around a special screen (such as HP systems that really need an HP terminal). These systems allow you to keep logs of what you are doing and almost always allow you to re-direct output so that you can get a hardcopy from a common printer. A hardcopy terminal would only slow you down, and you would lose your screen-editing ability. On HP-1000 systems, when you delete a character, it just backspaces over the character and lets you re-type it, even if you are on a hardcopy terminal (very messy). Developement systems: When developing and debugging a system, you often need to dump huge amounts of raw data to your terminal. Soimetimes it would be nice to be able to print what's going on (as in the case of unexpected crashes), so you can ahve a perminent record of what happened. Other times, the lack of speed while printing would slow you down. On such systems, it would be nice to have a both capabilities. Speaking of both capabilities, HP DOES make a display terminal that has a thermal printer 'stuck' on the top. It is called the HP2621P (there is a cheaper model called the HP2621B). This terminal will work with HP screen editors, and also allows you to print in two basic modes. For those who occasionally need a hardcopy of a piece of information on the screen, you can stop output and position the cursor at the line you wish to print, and print that line, or all the lines from there to the bottom of the screen. for those of you who want it to look like a plain hardcopy terminal, you can LOG-BOTTOM and print each line automatically just as it scrolls up off of the last line on the screen. (It does not print a character at a time, so you can use backspace to correct the line before printing.) We have a few of these for use on most of our systems and they are usually in high demand. They are especially useful on developement systems, hovever, the thermal paper is much more expensive than cheap lineprinter paper. This means that you might want a cheap hardcopy terminal for systems designed for hardcopy terminals (and for operator consoles). Randy Sherry
ITTAI@MIT-MC@sri-unix (10/24/82)
From: Ittai Hershman <ITTAI at MIT-MC> Well, obviously line oriented, pre-CRT, systems are an exception, but even there-you'd be surprised. The first mainframe I used was an Amdahl V6 running WYLBUR, and believe it or not--even there people found CRTs much easier to work with (being able to see under the print-head was one small advantage...). I have a laser printer at work, so I do not need much else. However, I may buy a cheap OKIDATA (like EPSON but with integral serial port) and a new gadget I heard about that works with the H19 (which is my home terminal). This device allows me to print an entire screen off in one shot--it catches the data from the terminal at a fast baud rate, buffers it and prints at the printers speed--this frees me from the physical specs of the printer and allows me to proceed with my work. All this costs about the same as an LA36 (yuch!). Indeed many terminals come with this standard. The best of both worlds. BTW if people hardcopy their mail to read at home, how do they respond? I tend to doubt that they pencil their thoughts on paper at home, and then type it into the system... -Ittai