Holbrook.ES@parc-maxc.arpa (04/25/83)
I had a chance to check out the Epson QX-10 Valdocs system this weekend. I was favorably impressed with the documentation. It comes with with a nice reference manual and a quick reference guide that stands up, presumably so you can place it next to your keyboard. The quick reference guide included keyboard maps noting the advanced commands and graphics characters available. The system was quite easy to use. I only spent about 20 minutes playing with it, but I had no trouble figuring out how to get it do what I wanted. I spent most that time looking at the documentation and playing with the editor. The editor is fairly easy to use. The basic commands are all accessible through dedicated cursor and function keys. Advanced editing commands are available via control keys. Valdocs keeps the line you are working on at the center of the screen at all times - thus, when you hit the cursor down key, all the lines on the screen shift up, rather than the cursor alone moving. The characters were very crisp looking - some brand of green screen is used, and all the characters (including bold and italic) were easy to read. The bottom of the screen is a status line showing tab stops and margins, and the current page, line and column the cursor is in. That's the good stuff. Now for the complaints. I don't agree with Tom Almy who referred to the Valdocs as "the slowest system I have ever seen". I expected switching between different functional areas to be somewhat slow on a floppy disk, and it was - but no unacceptably so. And it was certainly faster than quiting from an editor to invoke a separate scheduler, and then having to restart the editor. What was slow was the screen update. Keeping the line the cursor is in means that the entire screen has to be updated with each upward/downward cursor motion. The screen refresh thoughput appears to be a fair amount below 9600 baud. The typein feedback is abysmal. Insert mode is standard (replace mode is also available). Inserting in a line is reasonable until the line overflows or the typein passes the right edge. At this point, the second half of the screen is updated. To its credit, an incremental update algorithm is used - if the user continues typing in, the screen update will pause to echo characters, and will continue when the user pauses. This would be fine, except that once the user continues about 20 characters into the next line without allowing the screen update to finish, the typein feedback slows down to about 1 character per second (!). The only way to avoid this is to pause and let the screen update finish. This is unacceptable - I would reject the machine for this reason alone. I have another nit that has nothing to do with the performance of the machine. I am a little disappointed in the quality of printed output avaialable. The QX-10/Valdocs is designed to be used the the Epson FX-80, which can handle the different typestyles with (I believe) proportional spacing. But to my eye, it's still low-quality dot matrix. With a machine that has this kind of capabilities, I'd like a way to get nice looking output. I must confess I'm spoiled - I'm used to using the Xerox Star and it's associated laser printers ... I don't want a laser printer, but some way to use a Diablo-style character printer would be desirable. Overall evaluation - the QX-10/Valdocs combination is a well-put together system with at least one major flaw. I'm very impressed that they've got this kind of integrated system to work on a Z-80 with floppy disks. The QX-10 comes with 256k of memory; I imagine that some clever use of bank-switching is made to avoid hitting the floppy disk as much. In the end, I still wish they had used a processor with a little more power. Paul Holbrook