Apurdue.209
fa.info-terms
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