From: nlane@well.sf.ca.us (Nathan D. Lane)
Subject: Qume QX-15 Review
Summary: $700.00 Xterminal 
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 20:28:23 GMT

I mentioned to a few people on the group awhile back that I had obtained a 
Qume QX-15 for the RS-6000.  It is a $700.00 serial only Wyse 60, vt220
and PC-Term capable dumb terminal that can also run X.  I think my
experiences with it are worth posting.

First of all, it is economic enough to replace old setups with Wyse
terminals and is pretty compatible with the Wyse 50 and 60.  We had one
application that would only accept Wyse 50 (hard coded escape codes)
and would not run over ethernet due to hard-coded escape delays (not
an RS-600 product, though).  We replaced all our Wyse 350's with the
Qume's and now the users can use the old application as well as X.
The terminal itself will run up to 115.2Kbps.  We run ours at 38.4K right
now because the older system can't handle the higher speed and the terminals
must be directly connected to the tty (won't run through a pty).

Anyway, the X is the most fascinating aspect of the terminal.  Yes, it does
run real X!  The server is actually running on the host machine and a special
super-compressed data stream is running over the line to the terminal.
When scrolling in an xterm, it feels slightly faster than an Ethernet
connected X-Station 120.  (When the terminal is running at 38.4K).
Pretty amazing for 38.4K.  At 115.2K using a Dickens Data Systems
HighPer Flex serial board, performance actually doesn't feel 4 times faster
than 38.4 - maybe only twice as fast.  I suspect that the HighPer Flex may
be able to run at 115.2K, but maybe only 57K or so sustained (though Dickens
doesn't seem to be able to answer that definitively for me despite
repeated attempts).  

I have had several problems with the server, running on the host,
dropping the connection.  However, our 220 is not exactly known for reliability.
It crashes when running slip at 19.2K, so I can hardly expect it to
keep up with 115.2.

I have run several applications ont he QX-15:

	CorelDraw	reasonable, but turning on preview window is slow
	Info		snappy, even graphics
	Xterm		snappy, even w/two scrolling away
	Xchomp		Pacman game, about four year old speed, but works
	Aster*X		the graphics editor, as to be expected is slow.
			redrawing of the icons can be slow in the word
			processor.  Slow means about 1 second to redraw
			18 20x20 icons
			Loading new fonts takes about 1/2 second per

I have not tried to run any benchmarking programs, since I don't have any for
AIX (or anything else for that matter).  All the programs above were
running under MWM and I could usually open up Aster*X (I HUGE hog of
a program), Info, three Xterms, clock, calculator before I ran out of
memory.  I ran out of memory once I hit three Aster*X windows, the clients
mentioned before and the Aix Interface Composer.

Theoretically, the Qume is also memory expandable from 1MB to more, but the
unit I have is evaluation so I don't want to tear it down to see if it
has SIMM sockets or not.

If anyone can point me to Xbenchmarks that compile EASILY on AIX, I'll
be glad to post those results.  I'll also be glad to answer any e-mail
about other considerations and problems with these terminals.

-Nathan Lane
Trico Title company, Santa Barbara, CA
nlane@well.sf.ca.us

Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix