Re: [9fans] dull question #1

["Fariborz 'Skip' Tavakkolian" <fst@real.com>]

For purely nostalgic reasons, induced by this thread, I fired up my old
3B2/400,
630 and an ancient 5620. It reaffirmed why I liked the 630 so much. In fact
the last program I wrote that had any graphical elements in it was for the
630.

The reminiscing also convinced me that, having Plan9,  I don't miss any of it.

At 08:40 AM 9/3/2001 GMT, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
>
>
>"Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote:
>
>> dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
>> > in use.  One real problem was the long startup time:
>> > about 9 minutes to download the system, which had to be
>> > done perhaps daily because neither of the terminals had
>> > more than a small ROM (no flash, no floppy).
>>
>> In later commercial versions, the "layers" system was
>> preloaded (in terminal ROM), which helped a lot.
>>
>> By the way, I have a bunch of 5620s and a coule of 630s
>> I plan to restore then find good homes for.  If anybody
>> has others (also 730s) they want to contribute, feel
>> free to contact me about shipping/pickup.
>
>I wrote a window manager for the 730 that made it possible to
>tile windows so that you could get more apps loaded on the
>terminal without having to size/resize windows to small boxes
>when you weren't using them.  We (at Indian Hill and other
>exptools users) used the 730 (and 630) at 9600 baud for many
>years and then they made us switch to ISDN D-channel.
>
>The only cool thing about ISDN was that we got 7 virtual ports
>(ethernet did too) out of it so that you could connect
>to 7 different machines (if they had X-25 packet interfaces for
>D-channel traffic) at the same time and start layers and then
>open 7 different windows to those hosts.  If you had the 4MB
>memory upgrade, this was perfectly wonderful.  With a few
>other apps loaded the terminal just rocked!  Too bad that it was
>cancelled by NCR when they took control of it...  It truely was
>one of the first examples of an awesome network appliance!
>
>Wow, just had to get that off my chest...
>
>Gregg Wonderly
>
>