Product Overview - Data General DASHER D100 User Reference

Chapter 1
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
DASHER D100/D200 display terminals are ASCII-based,
offered with the following choice of international character
German, Spanish and Swedish/Finnish.
Designed for use in a wide range of interactive terminal
applications, D100/D200 terminals communicate with a
computer in full-duplex mode over either a 20mA current
loop or EIA RS232-C communications line. Both models
support a subset of standard EIA modem control functions
that allows them to interface to Bell 103, 113 or 212
compatible modems.
D100/D200 terminals consist of two units: a CRT display
(mounted on a swivel base) and a detached keyboard. A
3.95 foot (1.2 meter) external cable connects them. On line,
the display and keyboard function as two independent I/O
devices while sharing a common asynchronous interface
located in the display unit to communicate with a computer.
The terminal's asynchronous interface transmits and
receives serial data bursts at transmission rates ranging
from 50 to 19200 bits per second. Additionally, D100/D200
terminals have a split-baud and printer option. When
present, this option allows the transmit and receive
transmission rates to be selected independently. While each
serial data burst must contain 1 start bit and 7 data bits, the
remaining code parameters (parity type and number of
stop bits) as well as the data transmission rate(s) are
DISPLAY
The display unit of both terminals has a 1920-character,
semiconductor memory and a non-interlaced video
monitor with a 12 inch diagonal screen. The screen's active
area is 8.5.inches by 5.5 inches, formatted as 24 lines, 80
characters per line.
All printing characters sent to the display are stored in
memory and displayed on the screen as 7 by 11 dot matrices.
The non-destructive cursor is displayed as a solid 7 by 11
white field; i.e., all dots in the 7 by 11 matrix are intensified.
The display interprets a subset of the ASCII-128 control
characters as display commands. In general, D100/D200
display commands can be divided into three functional
¢ Screen control and cursor commands
e Character attribute commands
e Terminal identification and remote
commands
diagnostic
The first command group controls screen erasing, blinking,
and rolling as well as cursor positioning and sensing.
The second command group assigns one or more of the
following attributes to displayable characters: blink, dim,
underscore and/or reverse video (black character on a
white field). Since attributes are added to characters as
they are stored in the display's memory, they can be added
or deleted on a character-by-character basis.
The third command group initiates the transmission of
terminal identification information to the computer. It also
places the terminal in diagnostic mode. In this mode,
DASHER D100/D200 diagnostic programs can be remotely
loaded from the computer and executed by the terminal's
internal microprocessor.
KEYBOARD
Figures 1.2 and 1.3 show the D100 and D200 keyboards,
respectively. Both keyboards have typewriter-style main
keypads and incorporate a typematic facility. Typematic
allows the user to repeat a character (at a 10 character per
second rate) by simply pressing a key for a period of one
second or' more.
In addition to the main keypad, the keyboards contain one
or more supplementary keypads. D100 keyboards contain
a single supplementary keypad that combines screen
management functions with standard numeric keys. D200
keyboards contain two supplementary keypads — screen
management and numeric — plus 15 user function keys.