brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (05/17/85)
No matter what you say about all the other points regarding a forced micro, this insisting on 400 line resolution is a real scam, and I am amazed AT&T got away with it. The fact is, the AT&T machine is an improved copy of the Big Blue, about the closest thing there is to a standard around. To take that standard and insist on that one difference is a real joke. What software is going to need 400 lines? Text based software? Editors? Compilers? Text processing? Business software? All of these are great with 50 lines of text but they can do just fine with 25, just not quite as well. This covers about 90% of the software. The rest is special graphical software, which is usually written in a somewhat resolution independent way. The clear solution would have been to let people get any PC compatible that had a certain minimum of memory. You would have served everybody almost as well, and not locked people into nearly as narrow a decision. Besides, there are 400 line display cards for the IBM, and you could easily get somebody to make an AT&T type display card with a guaranteed order of a few thousand. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473