[42] in 1993-clients
DECstation 5000/25 vs. RS/6000 220h
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Reid M. Pinchback)
Tue Mar 17 11:19:41 1992
To: 1993-clients@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 92 11:18:45 EST
From: Reid M. Pinchback <reidmp@Athena.MIT.EDU>
Ok, after doing assorted testing of software on both machines, here is
a summary of what I found.
** General Comments **
Preferred machine: Maxine
Using a small monitor: I found that I quickly got used to the size of
the smaller monitor on the Maxine. I had expected it to be a source of
irritation, but because the video is so fast, it wasn't a problem iconizing
things to get them momentarily out of my way. Windows can pop up and down
in the blink of an eye. Its nice to have colour available for graphics
applications, so the trade of colour vs. size seemed worthwhile. Text
isn't as crisp as on mono/greyscale monitors, but not enough to be a
problem.
Using greyscale: Although the monitor is bigger and crisper, this is
definitely a mixed blessing. Often applications seem to assume that they
are on a true colour monitor when they are on greyscale, and thus things
become invisible. This happens with Maple 3D plots and with some courseware.
I think we should be careful about increasing the proportion of greyscale
monitors "out in the field" until we make a concerted effort to figure
out what applications are adversely effected and whether we can do anything
about that.
** DECstation 5000/25 Observations **
Bugs:
1. Same show_console bug as on the RS/6000 320h, the console flickers and
vanishes if you do things like "show_console" in the first minute or
so after you log on.
2. Sometimes the top borders of windows get hidden under dash, and you have
to use "raise" to get them on top... clicking on the border won't do it.
This happened consistently on one day of testing... then went away and
never happened again.
Differences:
1. Window proportions (vertical height vs. horizontal height of window) are
different for X applications like xrn.
2. The difference between vertical and horizontal resolution, makes
fewer text lines available in xterms, or icons get hidden at the
bottom. We may need to put more effort into user education on how
to set up X configurations that account for machine differences.
Bugs in software packages (ie: probably not Maxine's fault):
1. SAS/ASSIST buttons overlap. Dot reported this bug to SAS.
2. SAS/GRAPH plotting unconnected points uses both big and little circles.
It looks like SAS has rounding error in its code, so that sometimes
it uses too many pixels to plot the circles denoting points.
Likes:
1. The X server and/or video is very fast. I like it!
2. I never noticed a noticeable pause in disk activity, like you
do on the RS/6000's and to a lesser degree on the DECstation 3100.
Dislikes:
1. It looks like the white is a slightly muddy grey, but that may just
be how the default colours are set up. You notice it particularly
if you look at icons, where the contrast is not as good as it could be.
2. Keyboard is kind of mushy, not as crisp feeling as the RS/6000 keyboard.
** RS/6000 220h Observations **
Notes for RS/6000 220H.
Bugs:
1. In telneting to special-agent-cooper and starting emacs, key bindings
don't work properly (I think this happens on 320H machines as well).
Key bindings work fine when doing this on the maxine.
2. Maple looks horrible after telneting to cooper and sending windows
to the 220H display, something drastically wrong with the font. This
doesn't happen on the 320H or on the Maxine.
3. SAS doesn't work on this machine at all but does work on the 320H.
You get errors like:
X Toolkit Warning: Cannot find callback list in XtRemoveAllCallbacks
SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN (vynever): rc: $000186CA module vamain() in `va.c' --> Ack!No runnable tasks and no pending timers!!!
Likes:
1. Nice keyboard, better than the maxine keyboard by far.
2. Nice, quick X server/video, but not as fast as Maxine.
3. Icons are cleaner than maxine icons, which get sort of a muddy grey.
4. The video is a bit crisper on this monitor than on the maxine monitor.
Dislikes:
1. The video has a grainy appearance, you can see the raster lines and
its distracting.
2. Takes longer to startup than maxine, but that may be because of
the afs/nfs translation.
3. Same problem as the 320H, that the software mouse cursor stops moving
when significant disk activity (like swapping) is occurring.
4. Greyscale 3d-plotting doesn't work all that well on maple, since
distant parts of the graph map to darker colours, like black.
-----------
Reid M. Pinchback
Faculty Liaison
Academic Computing Services, MIT
