Make no mistakethe NCD Explora is an X-terminal product
through and through. NCD has made no attempt to customize Explora or adapt it to
the Windows NT market. Just getting Explora to work in an NT-only environment
can be challenging, because Explora is incapable of fully booting from ROM and
wants to boot from a UNIX system. Unfortunately, I didn't happen to have a UNIX
system lying around that week, but then again, such situations make this NCD
story interesting.
If you put aside the Explora's X-centric nature, you find a pretty
interesting desktop unit. The base unit is a small box with connections for
Ethernet, keyboard, monitor, mouse, parallel port, serial port, and a PC Card
(formerly PCMCIA) slot. You can buy the monitor, keyboard, and mouse from NCD,
or you can supply your own. As with most X-terminals, you configure the Explora
with an IP address (it does not support DHCP), and you can configure a UNIX host
for it to boot from. Again, booting the Explora was a problem for me until I
discovered that NCD offers an add-on software product called NCDware that lets
you boot X-terminals from the NT server that hosts the X-terminal sessions.
Like the other vendors I reviewed, NCD offers its version of WinFrame,
called WinCenter (see Screen A). But WinCenter goes beyond WinFrame because it
adds support for X-terminal access. To enable this support, you must first
install NCD's OEM version of WinFrame on your designated server and then install
a second WinCenter add-on (the WinCenter package includes both WinFrame and the
add-on). Once the add-on is in place, your server can accommodate access from
both ICA and X-terminalsif you can get your X-terminals to boot in the
first place.
The final piece was an NCD product, NCDware. This product is an add-on that
installs after WinCenter (including the X-terminal add-on). NCDware includes an
implementation of Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) and the download code
for the Explora terminal. With NCDware in place, I booted the Explora terminal
and tested it using NCD's WinCenter software. Note that NCDware lets you
download other types of X-terminals, but NCDware includes download code for only
a limited set of X-terminals.
I tested ICA access to WinCenter on the Wyse terminal and the Tektronix
Netstation terminal in ICA mode. I also tested X access on the NCD Explora
terminal, the Tektronix Netstation terminal in X mode, Insignia's NTRIGUE Mac
Client (an X-terminal emulator), and both NCD's PC-Xware and Hummingbird's
Exceed X-terminal emulation software running on an NT Workstation system. I had
no problems with NCD WinCenter's support for ICA or X-terminals. Also, NCD
Explora's performance was close to the Wyse ICA terminal's (though Explora had a
slight performance edge).
Will you want to consider the NCD Explora terminal? I really liked the unit
after I overcame my problem with booting it. From a broader perspective,
however, you'll probably want to stay away from this unit if you don't have
experience with X-terminals or you don't have X-terminals in your network.
However, if you have developed a taste for X-terminals, the NCD Explora is
clearly worth considering. The same applies for NCD's WinCenter and optional
NCDware software products: If you don't have X-terminals in your network, you
won't find much of interest here. If X-terminals are in your network (or in your
future), though, you might get excited about X-to-NT access and booting your
X-terminals from an NT server.