From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Gregg Wonderly Message-ID: <3B91A8F8.A2943C91@home.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <20010815015220.6F5F219A27@mail.cse.psu.edu>, <3B7ACCB1.E6AFF32A@null.net> Subject: Re: [9fans] dull question #1 Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 08:40:25 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: e89513ec-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 "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