Date : Wed, 24 Jun 1987 22:50:15 GMT
From : tektronix!orca!tekecs!lemming!andrew@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Andrew Klossner)
Subject: Re: Epson Geneva?
[]
"I am thinking of picking up an Epson Geneva (portable CP/M
system), and I was wondering if anyone had any real-life
opinions from it (or info)."
I have one of these, bought it at list price when it was the best
laptop on the market. You can get them from DAK for just a few hundred
bucks. It runs standard CP/M-80 on a CMOS Z80 lookalike.
The biggest drawback is the slow screen draw rate. The display is
eight lines of 80 characters, and output to it is effectively less than
1200 baud. This is okay for entering a first draft (composing a
document), but isn't acceptable when editing, at least for me.
"How do you access the on-board cassette drive (does it look
like a floppy? or do you have to stream to it?)"
The cassette is drive H:. It looks just like a CP/M disk but you can
only have one file open at a time. It has a directory in the first few
blocks. Output to it is effectively 300 baud so this device is all but
USELESS for file storage. Forget it!
"How is the display (it's LCD, and I worry about readability)"
It's not readable in low light. You have to position yourself so that
a light source is overhead and on the other side of the display from
you. In a room with overhead fluorescent lights there's no problem.
"I would be getting it with a 64K ramdisk, not the 120K
version. Can I expand this with just plugging in more RAM
chips?"
No. Get the 120K RAM disk.
I have the 120K RAM disk (it's really 120K not 128K) and the floppy
disk drive, and I rarely use the floppy drive. The floppy interface is
a serial line at 38400, too slow. This is okay for backup/restore of
the RAM disk. The other use I make of it is for the SAVE command in
Infocom games, since those games completely fill the 120K RAM disk.
-=- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew) [UUCP]
(andrew%tekecs.tek.com@relay.cs.net) [ARPA]