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From: mercury@ut-dillo.UUCP (Larry E. Baker)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: Re: MIX editor "review" (somewhat long reply)
Message-ID: <223@ut-dillo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Dec-85 15:41:46 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-dillo.223
Posted: Thu Dec  5 15:41:46 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Jan-86 07:19:53 EST
References: <2646@ut-ngp.UUCP> <15000028@smu>
Organization: University of Texas at Austin
Lines: 50

[]

hu@smu writes:
> Hello, could you please elaborate a little more about this TI PC's 
> drawback business? (see below)
>
> [quoted from my article]
> COMMENTS:      The editor seems pretty nice, given its cost.  I have
>                not had a chance to examine or test it completely, mainly
>                due to problems with our TI PCs:  currently, the editor
>                must use the subset of the ANSI screen driver present in
>                the BIOS, which is so awful that the editor is reduced to
>                re-drawing th will make
>                it *much* friendlier.  With a good ANSI driver, or
>                something that supported things like "insert a line," it
>                .....

Surely.

The TI has only two major flaws:

1)	The floppy disks are SLOW.  Noticably slower than the IBM PC's,
	though they are quieter.

2)	The ANSI.SYS screen driver is abominable.

	The driver on the IBM PC is, I belive (though I have not verified
	this), far more complete.  On the TI about the only thing that
	is supported is direct location of the cursor; no delete-line,
	erase-to-end-of-line, scroll-screen-up, scroll-screen-down, etc.
	This forces the MIX editor to re-draw the screen every time you
	do something drastic, like try to scroll the file *down* the screen.

	Note that I am being deceptive in calling the screen driver
	'ANSI.SYS' -- it is really part of the BIOS itself, there is
	no 'ANSI.SYS' file.

Otherwise, I think it's a *great* machine.  Not many products (that I
know of) use the ANSI driver, so its lack of useful features is no great
flaw.  The slowness of the floppys is, though adding a hard disk would
quickly alleviate this problem.

Overall, I like it more than my IBM.

Larry
-- 

Larry Baker                          mercury@ut-ngp.{ARPA, UUCP, UTEXAS.EDU}
University of Texas at Austin        ut-sally!ut-ngp!mercury@csnet-relay.CSNET
Computer Science                     phgl774@uta3081.BITNET