info-terms (04/02/83)
>From UCBVAX.@MIT-MC.Sibert@MIT-MULTICS Sat Apr 2 00:26:46 1983
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I had occasion to use these terminals for two months in Sweden, where
they are very popular (my client had bought several hundred).
The display is as Harry says: excellent. Of course, it has only 80
columns and 25 lines, which I find inadequate, but it's really excellent
for small screen applications.
Setup mode: well-documented, but a frill: how often do you change the
settings of most of those things? On the other hand, it's just ROM, and
it's no more difficult to use than a reference card would be.
Most of my complaints refer to the keyboard, which I will concede is a
matter of taste. I had a lot of trouble with it, and so did many of my
client's employees. This can be illustrated by a response I got when I
griped about it: "Yes, the TDV2220 keyboard is unusual, but you'll get
used to it in a few weeks, and I find that now, after I've used it for a
while, I can type almost as well as I can on a normal terminal".
.... But, please, sir, I don't WANT to spend a few weeks just so I
can type almost as well as I used to be able to!
My model had no rollover. The keyboard touch is very light, reminiscent
of TI portable calculators. The keys, when depressed, provide about an
eighth inch of travel, and a barely preceptible mechanical feedback,
which occurs slightly BEFORE the character is transmitted. The bottoming
of the keystroke is not firm.
Key placement is odd. The break key is in the far upper left, and is
only valid when shifted, and thus is virtually impossible to type
one-handed. The escape key is next to the break key, which is highly
inconvenient for Emacs use. The rubout key is a little better. There
is no tab key; instead, one must use control-I. The backspace key is
reasonably convenient, though I found control-H more so.
The shift-lock key is adjacant to the A, and very easy to hit. Unlike
typewriter keyboards, where shift AND shiftlock must be depressed
simultaneously to lock shift, the TDV2220 shiftlock takes effect
immediately. It has no mechanical feedback or latching, and its state
is indicated by a dim LED in the keycap, which is hidden behind a bright
orange lens, making it difficult to see except in near-darkness. The
same is true of caps-lock, but it is not so poorly placed.
Dropping DTR when the terminal is taken offline (to turn XON/XOFF flow
control on or off, for instance) is ridiculous; it makes every modem I
can think of hang up.
The terminals I used had Swedish character sets, which provide Swedish
characters in place of brackets and braces. Unfortunately, I was using
an ASCII system, and I found it difficult to reinterpret the display. I
understand that this problem doesn't happen with the U.S. models, but I
was appalled that Tandberg couldn't provide both the Swedish and ASCII
character sets, such that they could at least be switched between. I
would much rather have had that than 96 graphics characters.
I just don't understand how these people define "ergonomics". The
keyboard is flat. The keytops are flat. There is virtually no key
"feel", and very short key travel. The keys have round, non-indented
tops. They wobble from side to side. I've always believed that things
like the IBM Selectric keyboard were considered really excellent for
typing, and the TDV2220 is precisely its opposite in many respects.
A caveat: there is evidently a lot of model-to-model variation. The
several hundred that my client purchased were by no means identical.
Some had better (though never N-key) rollover than others. Some had less
slow insert/delete than others. Some had different keyboard
arrangements, and some had actually perceptible LEDs for shift-lock and
caps-lock. It's possible that the U.S. models have fixed some of the
other problems.
Also, I did run into a lot of other people who really liked them.
There's no accounting for taste. Me, I'd rather have an ADM-3A (at a
third the price), and when I think of the other, all less expensive,
alternatives (VT132, Concept 108, Heath-19, Ann Arbor Ambassador, TVI
950, ADM-32, to name but a few), I can't imagine wanting a Tandberg.
-- Olin Sibert