Re: [9fans] dull question #1

[Gregg Wonderly <gergg@home.com>]

"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