pjd (02/17/83)
Case Institute of Technology has established a personal computing laboratory for its students which will consist of fifty DEC PRO 350 computers with a local network connection to a VAX 11/730 file server. Twenty-five 350's will be distributed among the various departments and dorms. The first ten of our 350's were delivered yesterday. I had the opportunity to spend a day with a 350 (256 Kbytes RAM, 5 Mbyte Seagate Winchester, 2 floppies) and here are some preliminary comments: 1. Assembly was a snap. The elapsed time from tearing open the cartons to an installed operating system was 2 hours. The only slightly tricky operation occured when installing the floating point adapter. The main system board slides in easily except for the last centimeter. You need to push on it a little bit to compress the "grounding springs" between the disk units and the options box. 2. Internally, 1/3 of the volume is power supply! The disks occupy most of the remaining 2/3's. The main system board resides under the disks and the options box. The keyboard, system box and monitor consumed most of the area on my standard size desk. 3. Directions to install hardware and software are explicit -- almost reminiscent of Army training manuals. No problems were encountered while initialing the Winchester with P/OS, Prose (the editor) or the on-line tutorial. 4. The on-line tutorial is moronic. Responses to the Help key and the P/OS user's guide are clear and very well-written. (Cheap shot: Commodore, whose documentation I rate as the worst in the personal computing market, could take some lessons here.) 5. I like the keyboard. At first, I would occasionally hit the Compose Character key at the lower left corner of the keyboard. But, I quickly broke this habit. The keys have a nice feel, and the cursor, Help, Do, etc. grouping is particularly nice. When cruising rapidly through the tutorial, my right hand would get a little tired since it was constantly poised over the Do key. When typing prose, my hands felt extremely comfortable, sometimes resting on the base area below the space bar. 6. The display is crisp and can be read in strong ambient light. The display was facing a window at my back and it was a sunny day in Cleveland so, ..... (A sunny day in Cleveland? Yes, we do get sun here.) In 132 column mode, the characters appear squished together, but are surprisingly readable! 7. Moving between menu pages was sometimes a pain due to several long delays while a new page was being fetched and then drawn. In some cases, a page was unnecessarily redrawn adding to my annoyance. When installing an application program from disk, it can be placed at one of two menu levels -- either at the top or one level down from the top. 8. The editor, Prose, was installed at the top level. I am an Emacs enthusiast (mea culpa) and I found Prose VERY easy to learn although somewhat limited in capability. It can be learned without reading the manual just by trying random combinations. It has some nice human interface features, e.g., regions are emphasized in bold so you know what is about to get deleted or moved. DEC has implemented file version numbers -- hurray! Since this is the modern world, multiple directories are also available. Overall comments. I am favorable impressed. For first time users, it is almost impossible to screw up! We have now uncrated, assembled and tested three units, and none of them has failed. When we have a chance to try the UCSD Pascal system and PRO/Basic and to run some benchmarks, we will issue another report. p.j. drongowski computer engineering & science case western reserve university
ron@brl-bmd@sri-unix.UUCP (08/11/83)
From: Ron Natalie <ron@brl-bmd> I think the first copy of this letter got destroyed in a slight weapons mishap last night... I am told by Armando Stettner at DEC that the 350 uses the F-11 (11/23 style) chip set which is a little spiffier than the T-11 single chip. Unfortunately it differs from the LSI-11 in that it uses a different proprietary (read: undocumented) bus and the 350 devices do not DMA. Oh well, so much for having a nice little desktop UNIX machine. Not even the world's largest computer manufacturer brings you kludges like this... -Ron