From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-terms Newsgroups: fa.info-terms Title: Micro-Term Ergo 4000 Article-I.D.: ucbvax.872 Posted: Sun Feb 13 08:03:12 1983 Received: Tue Feb 15 07:27:57 1983 >From @MIT-MC:X.GYRO@MIT-MC Sun Feb 13 08:02:02 1983 Received: from UCBARPA.BERKELEY.ARPA by UCBVAX.BERKELEY.ARPA (3.300 [1/17/83]) id AA14706; 13 Feb 83 08:02:02 PST (Sun) Received: by UCBVAX.BERKELEY.ARPA (3.300 [1/17/83]) id AA14714; 13 Feb 83 08:02:39 PST (Sun) Sender: X.GYRO@MIT-OZ To: "King@Kestrel"@ml Cc: info-terms@mc In-Reply-To: Msg of 10 Jan 1983 17:52-EST from Richard M. KingI saw this demoed recently and was not impressed. It does indeed have 66 lines, but the display quality is marginal -- looks like they made a bad choice of anti-glare screen. We put it side by side with a (horizontal format) Ann Arbor Ambassador at 60 lines, and the two were about equally readable, though their imperfections were completely different. The keyboard has a slightly better feel than the Ambassador's, but lacks n-key rollover. Also, no one has written meta key roms for it. Perhaps the worst problem is that, unlike the Ambassador, it only has one character size, so people who prefer readability to density are out of luck. If it were cheaper than the Ambassador I might be hard pressed to make a choice between the two, but since it's $1700 I wouldn't even consider it. And a damn shame it is, too, since it looked from their literature that somebody had *finally* build the Right Terminal (for which I would gladly fork over $1700). Funny how all these people who are into "ergonomics" (e.g. the 4000 has a detachable keyboard with palm rest, which I really like) forget that fundamental terminal ergonomics requires a readable (and, for many applications, dense -- at least 48x80) display and a typeable keyboard (which *requires* n-key rollover). Oh well... -- Scott Layson