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From: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.terminals
Subject: Brain damage of a different color
Message-ID: <286@pan.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Sep-87 13:52:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: pan.286
Posted: Tue Sep 15 13:52:40 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Sep-87 13:44:14 EDT
Reply-To: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Organization: Pansystem Informatics AG, Zuerich, Switzerland
Lines: 22


While considering brain damaged terminals, and manufacturers attempts to
invent new, different and inscrutable new kinds of brain damage, ponder
this for a while.

Esprit systems (some sort of successor to Hazeltine) make a terminal that
is sort of almost ansi compatible, kind of.  Except, sigh, with the very
high price of memory today, they couldn't afford to put in enough to be
able to handle attributes correctly.  Now, they didn't want to get nailed
for the old magic cookie problem, so they came up with something that is,
in my experience, a completely unique, orginal botch.

This terminal (I think it was called the 6515) supports one attribute on
the screen without using magic cookies.  Exactly one.  Any one.  The real
kicker is, you *change* which attribute it is by sending the ansi standard
set attribute sequence!  So, you go somewhere on the screen, and write some
underlined text.  Then, you go to some completely different place, and send
the set bold attribute sequence.  Presto!  That underlined text that you
wrote just turned into bold!  Of course, this works with blink, half bright
and so on - my favorite is no-display.

jw