[33] in 1993-clients
opinion on evaluation machines from IBM and DEC
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (alexp@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Fri Mar 13 10:09:12 1992
From: alexp@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: 1993-clients@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 92 10:08:51 EST
My two bits worth:
Leaving the technical details to the experts, most of my strong feelings are
based on the "working environment". I think that the comments about the focus
issue are right on the mark. If I had to work on the DECstation with the color
monitor as is for any length of time, I'd do crazy. I know it's out of focus
and/or convergence, but I have a feeling that even if it were perfectly tuned,
it would still look blurry to me. Most DEC monitors, monochrome included, look
out of focus to me, so maybe it's an endemic problem in the brands they use.
I'm very sensitive to this but suspect that others are picking up on this also.
By contrast, the screen on the RS/6000 looked razor-sharp and would be a joy to
work with (this is the grey-scale monitor that has been running this week). I
have also noticed that color monitors on IBM's in the clusters (both RT's and
RS/6000's) generally look very sharp and clear. I think DEC could take a lesson
from IBM on monitor selection (I don't know the brands IBM uses but they look
great).
I generally liked the DEC best, as far as responsiveness, mouse speed, keyboard
feel and so on. Everything I tried worked fine. If we can get a really sharp
monitor on it, I think it would be a good choice. I think we should go for
color as much as possible. It's a real asset generally, and more and more new
software packages use it extensively or even require it.
Alex
