HM monitor to be discontinued

[David L. Markowitz]

In article <8905011806.AA05219 at muir.ai.sri.com>, moran at ai.sri.com (Doug Moran) writes:
> In trying to find out when the HM, hi-resolution (1600x1280) monochrome,
> monitor would be available on the 4/60 (SPARCstation-1), I have been
> informed that Sun will be discontinuing the HM and plans to not offer it
> on new products (whether or not it will be available on the 4/60 was
> ambiguous).
> 
> I was told that the reason for discontinuing the HM monitor is that it
> accounts for such a tiny fraction of the monitors that Suns sells, and
> therefore Sun cannot continue to justify supporting it.  Sun also believes
> that customers actively dislike it, but I believe that a large part of the
> problem is that Sun has not effectively promoted and supported it.

We have a few of these beasts.  We find that we DON'T like them.  There
are two main reasons:

1) Text too small - causes eye strain.  I know you can change your fonts,
and some of my users do this, but with most of our screens 1152x900 they
have to maintain two .defaults files, and even that doesn't help with the
text embedded in icons.  Make that bigger, and then you can only fit a few
chars in the icon (which is still 64x64).

2) Lack of support from third-party software vendors.  In particular, we
use Interleaf TPS and Cadre TeamWork on most of our stations.  Interleaf
uses only the 1152x900 part of the screen, and "N point" fonts come out
smaller and harder to read.  You can't use a bigger font, because they
would print as bigger fonts.  TeamWork can use the entire screen, but uses
a fixed font with no way to change it.

If Sun and other vendors would give an option to use N point @ 100 dpi fonts,
then the enhanced resolution of the HM would pay off.  Just using it for
more "real estate" is not sufficient in my book.

	David L. Markowitz		Rockwell International
	...!sun!sunkist!arcturus!dav	dav at arcturus.UUCP
	The above opinions are merely that, and only mine.