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Apurdue.209 fa.info-terms utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!purdue!cak Fri Feb 26 16:12:11 1982 Re: Tek 4112 We got one of these, and a couple of us proceeded to work on it. It has a lot of nice graphics features, but we also found it impossible to run a screen editor on.

I have never liked using thumbwheels for doing cursor positioning. I am a mouse/tablet fan, but that's all you get. They work pretty well. My basic gripe with the terminal is that it's so damn SLOW! It will eat vectors alive -- no problems there. But I put up a CIF checkplot program for it, and was amazed at how slow it is when filling regions. It has an 8086 in it, so it should be rather speedy, but it could not keep up with fill area commands at 9600 baud (it did lots of XON/XOFF while I was talking to it). The other problem is zoom/pan refresh. If you have a dense picture up, and want to zoom in on it, that's fine; it will show you more detail. However, when you do the refresh of the screen, it repaints the WHOLE picture, even the parts you can't see any more. If it took 20 minutes to display your original plot, it will take 20 minutes to display the zoomed in picture. Simply amazing.

I also have little gripes about the way it does rubberbanding and graphical input in general. Some of these seem to be braindamage, and I have worked with the local Tek representative on them (no results yet).

It's better than a 4012/4014, but I don't know if it's really worth having -- there must be alternatives.

Chris Kent, Purdue U CS

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