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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbatt!cbuxc!cbuxb!cbrma!karl
From: karl@cbrma.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.terminals
Subject: Re: Brain-damaged Terminal Contest
Message-ID: <5465@cbrma.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Nov-86 17:45:54 EST
Article-I.D.: cbrma.5465
Posted: Sun Nov 23 17:45:54 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Nov-86 04:27:42 EST
References: <1438@kitty.UUCP> <1140@mordred.cs.purdue.edu> <435@twitch.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T-BL, RMAS, Columbus
Lines: 51
Summary: DMD very nice, really

>avr@mordred.cs.purdue.edu writes:
>> 	Don't know about Most brain-damaged, but the BLIT (dmd 5620, AKA
>> Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal (I think) -- it should stand for BLAT --
>> Bell Labs Annoying Terminal). I'm on a BLAT right now, and some of it's
>> "features" are:

Mercifully, please note that BLIT is not an acronym; it's derived from
the bitblt operation.  Also, the BLIT is not the same as a DMD.  The
DMD was derived from work done with the BLIT.

You are apparently using either an older DMD with broken firmware
(circa 2 years ago), or aren't using the layers software for
multi-window capabilities.  Or both, of course.  Get the latest stuff;
the world improves much with it.

guido@twitch.UUCP writes:
>    To do what I can do with a DMD would require more than 3 normal
>terminals on my desk at the same time.  My productivity with the
>computer has gone up dramatically since getting a DMD.

That's what I had to do to get around to getting a DMD.  When the 4th
vt100 showed up on my desk, my boss finally decided that some bucks
should be spent on DMDs.

My productivity went way, way up with the DMD, too.  But I hit an
interesting psychological limit the other day.  I normally have 5
shells running and 1 system monitor, in order to see just how much of
a pig cbrma can be.  I am frequently cu'd out in 2 of those 5 shells
to other systems.  Last week, I had this arrangement, with 3 local
shells and 2 cu sessions outbound.  In one local shell and in both
remote systems, I was running GNU Emacs with between 2 and 4 M-x shell
subprocesses running.  All told, I had 13 or 14 shells active at
various CPUs.  I was typing away fairly well, getting lots
done on all the systems, and then I abruptly selected one window,
looked over what I had been doing there...and didn't have the faintest
idea what it was I had intended to do next.  Very strange - I had
never had that happen before.

Now, there was a study done a number of years back on "the magic
number 7 plus or minus 2," which made the point that Joe Average can
handle approximately 7 tasks at one time in his head.  Sometimes it's
only 5, and sometimes it can get as high as 9.  Going higher than 9 is
considered rare, maybe impossible.  And I proved it conclusively to
myself by trying (and failing) to use 13 shells.  But it was
interesting that it took me maybe 45 minutes of doing this sort of
work before I finally got out of sync.  I have an impression that if I
did that sort of thing a lot, my tolerance for excessive windows would
go up.  Anybody ever do any work in this area?  Care to postulate and
pontificate on the possibilities?
-- 
Karl Kleinpaste