AT&T 630 terminal - software ??

[Wonderly]

>From article <1800005 at spdyne>, by root at spdyne.UUCP:
> 
>> In article <1003 at vsi.COM>, friedl at vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:
>> > ... if you can
>> > get it for under $2k then go for it.
> 
>      And just think, We are paying about $2,400 for an AST 286/10 With
> 1 Meg of Ram, EGA, 1 Serial & 1 Par. W/ Multi-Sync monitor... They make
> fine terminals....  I see no reason to "go for it" at all..  For 500 bucks
> more I can get a Amber monitor?  (Yes, I KNOW that this is ONLY a terminal
> and I am talking about getting a real computer for use as a 'smart terminal',
> but then, why not?  Unless you are doing I/O at 19,200 And doing large block
> transfers  (Graphic pages using >20K or so per page), I see little reason
> to buy terminals at all anymore...
> 
> 	On the other hand, I haven't ever seen on of these terminals, so
> who knows it might even outperform a programable computer... :-)

The point of the 630 is that the software base is already there, that is
if you have either an AT&T 3B computer or you or your vendor has
licensed the source for the driver.

I use a 615 which pages 3 different layers in a 24x80 screen.  Mine has
no memory for applications, but the manuals hint that there is some
other capabilities.  The 620 is supposedly closer to the 630, but I
do not have any experience with one.  I use 3 24x80 layers which allows
me to have a news window, a work window, and a mail window into the
unix machine that I use.

There are many benefits to this in terms of work convienience and user
community conviences.  In terms of the user community, they are not
paying the continual price of me starting subprocesses to do thing
from other applications as I get new mail or are otherwise distracted.
On small machines, this can be a real benefit.  If your machine only
swaps, and doesn't page, then there will be some swapping overhead that
will happen when I switch to a different layer and start typing at it
(providing it has been setting there idle, thus causing it to be swapped).

There are many-MANY things nice about the 630 environment compared to the
615.  For one, the larger screen allows you to have 2 completely visible
24x80 windows.  With memory expansion and the second hardware port, the
630 can give you 14 windows, 7 per host.  Some say that is more than
you would ever use, but I have used a 630 on occasion, and have used
all 7 windows on one host and had 3 on another.  To do what I needed
to do would have required me to find 10 different terminals because
I needed to have keyboard interaction with 10 different processes.
Shell Layers would not have worked because the 10 processes all have
common output that would have became intermingled and indistinguishable.

As for PC's...

As long as people continue to buy those damn Intel Processors, we will
never see real processing power at reasonable prices.  The manufacturers
need to sell enough of their products (I am purposely not mentioning
another manufacturer) to pay for tooling before they are going to reduce
their prices.

Besides, if you think that your AST/286 is so good, run the following
C program, if you get the output

1
70000

Your C compiler wins my award for effort otherwise you won't get any
words of sympathy from me...

main ()
{
	unsigned long i;
	char *s, *malloc();

	s = malloc ((unsigned)70000);

	for (i=0; i < ((unsigned)70000); i++)
		s[i] = i;

	printf ("%d\n%d\n", s[1], s[(unsigned)70000]);
}

-- 
Gregg Wonderly                             DOMAIN: gregg at ihlpb.att.com
AT&T Bell Laboratories                     UUCP:   att!ihlpb!gregg