AT&T S4 (oops, 7300) (oops, Unix PC)

[Jordan Brown]

The 7300 is a kinda neat machine; I keep being tempted to buy one.

It's not terribly fast to watch - terminal I/O ranges from ~60cps for stupid
programs that do single char writes to maybe 2000cps if you write big lines.
(these are not measurements; they are guesses - I'm assuming my 750 was really
sending at 9600 baud and then comparing that with the 7300)

I think it needs more than the base 512k - I believe it was swapping a lot.

Their windowing shell is interesting - I wouldn't want to use it for any length
of time, but it is occasionally useful - it has a menu-driven interface to
L.sys, for one thing.

They do not include a windowing shell for programmers (theirs is targetted
to compete with Macintoshes, which it does badly).  However, I thought about it
for a couple minutes and wrote a small program (initially ~20 lines, eventually
grew to ~40-50) which would run a specified command in a window, detaching from
the original window so that your shell continues.  You can then get some
semblance of job control, with virtual terminals.  (In fact, I think you
*could* start multiple gettys on the console, but I know of no reason to)

There are bitmap graphics which I know little about except that there are
raster primitives and GSS available.  They have a business graphics
application.

The mouse response is lousy, I believe because it is waking up the process
fairly often to do things.  I strongly prefer to use the keyboard equivalents
rather than the mouse, and I'm usually a mouse fan.

dBASE III, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Basic are available for it; I don't
know what others.

I'd be interested in other people's comments.