Info about the AT&T 620 terminal

[Stephen J. Friedl]

Hi folks,

     For those interested, here is a mini-review of the AT&T 620
terminal.  It has a mouse, bitmapped graphics, and a couple of
windows that the 3B2 knows how to drive in the layers
environment.  We had one of these on loan from a customer for a
while and got to know it "well".  In short, these are pretty
sorry terminals.

     The blink and dim attributes don't work (confirmed with
Hotline), and the terminal only does pseudo 132-column mode.  You
see 80 of the 132 columns it maintains internally -- you can
"scroll" sideways to get the ones you can't see.

     The terminal scrolls horridly.  It paints the screen OK, but
when it hits the bottom, it becomes obvious that the processor is
doing characters on a pixel basis because the movement "shimmers"
down the screen as the bits are moved.  It is not anything like
smooth scroll, and the effect is really terrible (can you say
"BLIT"?  Neither can the 620).  I did some tests and find that
timing the dump of a dozen /etc/termcap files shows around
3100bps throughput.

     I didn't have the right windows/layers software loaded on my
3B2, so I can't judge that (the 615's multi-tasking is so
sluggish on an unloaded 3B2/400 that we really can't use it).  My
customer runs Ficor Autograph (in Tek 4014 mode, probably) and
really likes it.  However, I've seen graphics on the Wyse 99GT
looking just as good for one third the price (the 99's are really
nice terminals).

     Feedback is welcome.

     Steve

-- 
Steve Friedl    V-Systems, Inc. (714) 545-6442      3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl at vsi.com     {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl

Nancy Reagan on the Mac-II architecture: "Just say Nu"