AT&T 630 terminal - software ??

[Paul_Heffner]

>From article <1762 at edison.GE.COM>, by rja at edison.GE.COM (rja):
> 
> The AT&T terminals catalog in front of me does not refer to the
> SSI/EIA board and specifically indicates that 2 RS-232-C ports
> are included with the #3344-630 controller...

The second serial port on the base controller for the 630 is for 
a printer port, you cannot use it for a second host access. The
SSI/EIA board is needed for this purpose. (The SSI port lets you
hook it to a 6500 family controller for access to the Synchronous/IBM
world.)


> An alternative would be the 620 MTG which is rather cheaper and
> has many of the same features and capabilities as the 630 MTG:

Yeah, I guess you could say that (I'm in layers on a 620 right now),
but the 630 is much better than the 620 in practically all respects.
Being limited to only one host is a real beat and this little turkey
won't come up in layers across our data switch (an equinox DSS) so I
have to use it directly connected to the host. (The 630 does just fine through
the switch and I've used it in layers through ISN, Datakit, and 2400 bps 
dialup) The 4014 graphics terminal mode is pretty nice but the 3b2 graphics 
software doesn't seem to like it too well. The 630 is a true workstation
with a development system available to allow you to run software directly
on the multi-tasking resident OS, while the 620 is a merely another ANSI
terminal which has a graphics mode and does a really good job on windowing
to "layers". It also has some strange ideosyncrasies absent from the
630 (as an example, when you fire up layers it paints the screen with
textured video and doesn't give you an initial window. You then need to
use the mouse to get to an initial window and do your work. On the 630,
it leaves your current window as the first xt window and indicates the
use of layers with the tiny "overlapping boxes" icon in the border of the
window.)

> The 620 is specifically mentioned as needing either the 5620 DMD 
> software or xt software on the host system to support multiple sessions.

The layers support software is supplied with all releases of System V 
release 3.x that I've seen. The 5620 DMD software doesn't give you 
anything of use on the 620.


Heff