Aucbvax.1738
fa.info-terms
utzoo!duke!chico!harpo!mhtsa!eagle!ucbvax!CSVAX.mark@Berkeley
Sun Jun 14 18:36:12 1981
TVI 950 page
File: TERMS, Node: TVI-950, Up: Top, Previous: Buyer's Guide, Next: ACT-IV
TVI-950 Televideo model 950
Status: Not upward compatible with tvi 912, but upward compatible with
adm3a (at least at Berkeley). Termcap descriptions exist.
Users: ihuxi!ihuxg!grg@ucb, ucsbcgl!eggert@ucb, cory.probst@ucb
Price: About $1000.
Screen: looks very much like vt100. white phosphor, good display
Chars: big - don't have it in front of me now but about 10x14.
Keybrd: Same awful feel as other TVIs. Layout is typewriter.
Detachable, but cord is compatible with telephone handset
cord, not stereo phone plug. Typeamatic on all keys.
Lots and lots of keys around the edges. Numeric pad.
Speeds: Up to 9600 baud.
Has: All but overstrike. Standout mode has "magic cookie" braindamage,
like other tvis and telerays and adds. Has all major forms
of standout (half bright, inverse, blink, underline, blank).
Misfeatures: Worst misfeature is the "edit group" of keys, which includes
backspace, tab, arrow keys, home, print, send, backtab, clear screen,
insert/delete line/char. As a group, these either work in local or
transmit their codes (escape sequence settable). Alas, if you want
a tab and backspace key that transmit ^I and ^H, you give up having
your print, send, and arrow keys work in local. If you have more
than one page of memory (1, 2, or 4 are possible) you need the arrow
keys to move back to previous pages. It might be possible to program
around this with software.
The other misfeature is that when you change page size, the screen
(and memory) are cleared. Since cursor addressing is memory relative,
and vi uses scrolling, you have to set the page size to 24 lines for
vi to work, and go back to whatever mode you like outside vi.
It would be nice to have your context left there, like on the concept.
There appears to be NO padding needed at all, even at 9600 baud. This is
true even if you turn off the xon-xoff handshaking.
The manual is so full of typos and errors it's pretty hard to figure anything
out from it, as of 6/81.
It has a "user line" (25th line) that you can feed any message you want into,
so we can run the h19sys program on it. But there are misfeatures. It just
stores up to 80 bytes in the line - escape, tab, etc will display as
control characters instead of doing what they should. Also, if you have the
user line displayed instead of the "status line" (showing the modes,
cursor position, etc) when you go into setup mode (like the vt100)
you go blind, not being able to see what you're doing.
I (Mark Horton) don't own one, but I borrowed it for a week to bring
up the termcap description in June of 1981.
Given a choice between a tvi and an h19 at the same price, I would choose
the h19. The h19 is, however, up to $300 cheaper.
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