nathan@orstcs.UUCP (11/23/83)
#N:orstcs:24000008:000:1140 orstcs!nathan Nov 17 08:49:00 1983 I have seen Adam now, and I'm undecided whether or not to be impressed. The keyboard layout is good, the feel is quite acceptable; it feels like rubber dome technology, not membrane. This makes the keys feel a little sticky, but they're not mushy. The built-in word processor is, well, interesting. How could they have put such a dog of a program into a commercial product? Who would admit to having written it? The user interface design is not especially bad; compared to anything I've seen on Unix it's phenomenal. But whenever you do anything involving insertion or deletion it *thinks* about it, then rewrites the screen. Twice. It takes several seconds after you mark a phrase and press the button until you can do anything else. The maximum scrolling rate seems to be about two lines per second. The game controls seem to be of adequate quality. One of them can be snapped into a holder on the side of the keyboard; but it seems you can remove this holder to make the keyboard module more compact. I can't fault the physical design of the system; but their software people seem to be in trouble. (so what else is new?)