Newsgroups: bit.listserv.notis-l
Date:         Fri, 6 Nov 1992 11:58:23 EST
From:         Merri Beth Lavagnino <MLAVAGNI@UVMVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Public/Staff Terminals

On Wed, 4 Nov 1992 15:11:26 EST Carmen Diaz, Systems Department said:
>UCONN is in the process of acquiring new terminals for staff and public
>use and would like to know what types of non-IBM, non-MAC terminals
>other sites are using to access NOTIS, how successful they have been, what
>your preference is, how long a life the terminal has had and the cost
>involved.  In particular, we are interested in any diskless pc's you are
>are familiar with or currently using.

We recently replaced most of our public 3270-type IBM terminals which were
connected through IBM 3174 and 3274 controllers with microcomputers. Dell
won the bid for these diskless 386SX's, 25MHz, with 2 MB RAM and VGA color
monitors. Final price $815, with two year next-day airshipped parts
maintenance. Some terminals were replaced with Macintosh LC II's, at a
greater cost.

Be advised that "diskless" means different things to different people. Some
say diskless means no hard drive, but with a floppy drive. Some say diskless
is no hard drive and no floppy drives. We added one floppy drive to many of
these stations to allow downloading. They are all connected to the campus
ethernet with ethernet cards containing a boot chip. They boot directly to
a Novell server, which locks them into a menu from which they can choose
any of our electronic resources. Our NOTIS catalog is first on the list,
then we have menu items for categories, such as "UVM, State, and Regional
Resources" (submenu has our CWIS, local newspaper indexes, VT legistlative
bills, etc.); "Journal Indexes" (Expanded Academic Index, UnCover,
ERIC, etc.); "Business Resources" (Dow/Jones and soon NEXIS/LEXIS, etc.);
"Internet Accessible Library Catalogs" (Libtel and also various highly used
library catalogs singled out), etc.

Access to most of these resources, including our own NOTIS catalog, is
through telnet. We do not display diacritics, so this solution would not
work if you need to display them, but you could use something like NET3270
instead of telnet in that case. We use NET3270 on our staff microcomputers,
and they display and enter diacritics. Some staff machines are diskless and
use the boot chip feature of their ethernet cards. These machines do not
boot directly to the Novell menu, although they can go to a staff version of
it if they like. NET3270 allows them to do multiple sessions, even multiple
technical services sessions with ALA diacritics, and also use a DOS
application (such as a wordprocessor or spreadsheet) while those sessions
are open (providing they have at least 640K RAM.) Our staff microcomputers are
a motley sort of very ancient to very new, and several different brands.
To display diacritics with NET3270, one must have a VGA monitor.

So far, so good, but I'm sure time will tell as far as how long a life the new
Dells have. Perhaps we should put aside the cost savings from the terminal and
controller maintenance contracts as if we still had them, and use this after
the two year maintenance runs out on the microcomputers!

Merri Beth Lavagnino
Head, Systems Dept.
Libraries and Media Services
University of Vermont
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU