From S J Delaney, UK Product Manager – Terminals & Printers, Digital Equipment Co Ltd, Reading, RG2 OTR.
I am writing regarding an item from Electronic News that was published recently by APT as an extract from Electronic News. The item was entitled DEC To Sell X-Stations OEM (CI No 1,977) and the first line of the article states that Digital Equipment Corp is very much an also-ran in X-terminals with its VXT 2000 line…. Aside from the fact that this is unsubstantiated, it is also totally untrue, almost to the point that in the light of the rest of the item, I wonder at the independence of the original source. The following points will comp letely refute the tone of the statement. 1) Digital’s VXT 2000 family is by far the widest available from any X terminal vendor, giving the customer maximum choice of monitor size and colour. 2) All VXT 2000s in host mode are downloaded with the same software image which can be insttalled on VAX/VMS, VAX/Ultrix, RISC Ultrix, Sun Microsystems, Helwett-Packard and IBM Unix systems to provide a truly open booting capability. The Window Manager is also fully Motif-compliant for maximum application compatibility and openness. 3) Additionally, Digital has produced an innovative server-based solution for the VXT 2000 that is based around Digital’s InfoSer ver 150 Ethernet storage device. In stand ard form, the InfoServer can boot up to 20VXT 2000s, and acts as a dynamic memory pool for those VXT 2000s; they get more memory as they require it – transparently to the user. It also acts as the storage area for additional X fonts that applications will use. Uniquely, this solution dramatic ally reduces network and host loading; no other X terminal vendor has addressed the problem of the impact that X display devices have on network or host system performance. It is Digital’s use of its custom-designed LASTport protocol that allows ultra high-speed virtual memory paging and transport of fonts to and from the InfoServer. No other X terminal vendor has this capability. 4) With the VXT 2000, Digital provides unmatched central configuration capability for a whole population of X terminals: users can concentrate on being productive, not on configuring their working environment.
