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From: mats@dual.UUCP (Mats Wichmann)
Newsgroups: net.info-terms
Subject: >66 line terminals: summary of responses
Message-ID: <556@dual.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 2-Jun-84 13:05:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: dual.556
Posted: Sat Jun  2 13:05:36 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Jun-84 07:49:40 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Dual Systems, Berkeley, CA
Lines: 55

I posted my request for terminals with more than 24 lines becuase I
was getting somewhat tired of being able to display so little stuff
on one screen. For example, I was thinking of being able to edit two
files and see context in both files (rather than 10 lines each...),
that sort of things. The response was not overwhelming, and I heard
nothing about a couple of terminals I had heard about quite a while
ago - Piiceon and Corvus. I had actually seen both of these terminals
more than a year ago, but they seem to have vanished....

Here's what I did find out:

Delta Data has a 28 line terminal. Is claimed to be easy to work with.

The BLIT/TTY 5620, is 77 lines x 88 columns. Most of you know about the 
BLIT already; it is really not especially useful without the software
package which is rather expensive. It also has, apparently like all the
Teletype terminals, fairly long persistence phosphor - something I
always found aggravating in a terminal.

Microterm makes a 66 line, 80 column ANSI terminal (model Ergo 4000). 
One of the respondents who mentioned this terminal says the characters
were VERY difficult to read. The other said it was `real good for
doing wordprocessing'.

C-ITOH makes a 66 line, 80 column ANSI terminal. Opinions were mixed
on this one as well; they have some effort into targeting it for
office use, and there was some question if it were comfortable for
programmers to use (apparently, the ESC key is a shifted function key!).

Ann Arbor has a 60 line terminal (the Ambassador); I did not get a clear
line on whether any of their other terminals (Guru?) were 60 line also.
After some initial responses, I got a very nice call from Mark Willaby
from Ann Arbor, and we had a chat about the Ambassador terminal. It appears
from this conversation that the Ambassador has always been targeted towards
programmers and scientists; they have done things to make using EMACS easier;
and the terminal is (claimed) capable of accepting characters at 19.2 kbaud
without any flow control (many people commented on the slowness of
redrawing a 60 line sceen in, say, VI). This sounded attractive enough
that I am going to try to get an evaluation unit of one for a while.


Conclusions: there is not nearly as much activity in this area as I had
thought. Of the available terminals, only two, Ann Arbor and the BLIT,
seem targeted towards programmers; the others (Delta Data, Microterm,
C Itoh, and presumably the two I know about but didn't hear about,
Corvus and Piiceon) are targeted towards the business (especially
word processing) market. My question is, when all of these window manager
packages really start catching on, who is going to want to run 4 windows 
on a  24 line x 80 column screen? Are you listening, terminal manufacturers?

[ Sincere thanks to all who responded to my query ]

	    Mats Wichmann
	    Dual Systems Corp.
	    ...{ucbvax,amd70,ihnp4,cbosgd,decwrl,fortune}!dual!mats