Aucbvax.6308 fa.info-terms utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-terms Thu Feb 25 20:29:06 1982 Tek 4112 >From cbosgd!mark@Berkeley Thu Feb 25 18:28:50 1982 I've just spent a week playing with a 4112. I have no idea what they cost, but I assume it's mucho bucks. Since I'm not a graphics expert and the only manual I had was the operators manual (they didn't give me a programmers manual so I didn't have much detail on the escape sequences) I can't really evaluate the graphics stuff. It seems to have the usual 1K x .75K frame buffer (white phosphor, no flicker at all, even with the screen full of text) and they alluded to some depth (e.g. brightness control) of the pixels, but I couldn't find any documentation to confirm the depth. It comes with a pair of thumbwheels for a pointing device, with options including a tablet (with a stylus or a mouse-style 4 button tablet pointing device), a floppy drive, 3 extra rs232 ports in the back, and 3 planes of graphics memory. The terminal weighs a ton! It's a desktop model but you need two people to carry one across the room. It's quite big and the keyboard doesn't detach - just as well, I don't think I'd want that heavy keyboard on my lap. The remaining evaluation will discuss using the 4112 as a regular CRT terminal - in particular an attempt to make a termcap for it. I'm enclosing my final result at the end. Basically, you can't run any existing screen editor on it. The best I could do was run it in glass tty mode, allowing the one line open mode in vi. For screen editing it's about as good as an adm3 (yes, a 3, not a 3a.) The situation is as follows. There are two kinds of areas: the dialog area (for text) and the other area (doesn't seem to have a name) for graphics. They overlap - the other area takes up most of the screen and has a fixed size; the dialog area can have up to 34 lines of 80 chars (default is 5) anywhere on the screen. It will remember a hundred or so lines of history in the dialog area - you can scroll back into it using the thumbwheel (this is nicely done). In the dialog area, it understands return, linefeed, backspace, and bell. There is also an escape sequence which clears the dialog area and homes the cursor in it. There is no way to move the cursor up off the bottom line, hence the inability to run a screen editor. (You could always clear and redraw for every keystroke, but you couldn't put the cursor where it belongs after drawing below it.) It is also possible to do text stuff in the other area. There is a clear screen sequence and even an (undocumented) cursor up command (^K)! It should also be possible to address the cursor by pixel addressing relative to the bottom left hand corner. Only problem is that there is no way to scroll the graphics area. Now I suppose it would be possible to repaint the whole screen here since you can put the cursor whereever you want. (Using linefeed, return, up, backspace and going right by typing over the character you're moving over.) But this would require an enhancement to vi that I didn't want to mess with. I wonder if any of the emaxen can handle this? I talked with at least 3 people from Tektronix trying to get this to work. When I told one of them I wanted to move the cursor around, he told me "If you wanted to do that, you should have gotten a 4025!" I dunno. It may be a wonderful graphics terminal, but it seems to me that a person working on graphics might want to edit his graphics program, and he shouldn't have to get a second terminal for that. Other random braindamage: instead of "smooth scroll" (ooze) mode, this terminal has a notion of acceleration and deceleration. If you are trying to scroll through a file with a wait for input after every page, it will gradually speed up through the first 3 or 4 lines, zoom through the middle of the page, and then gradually slow down for the last few lines. Also, when it hits the end of the page in the dialog area, you have four options for what happens: (1) it clears the screen and keeps going (2) it waits for you to hit page and then keeps going (3) it makes a hard copy and then keeps going (4) it sends a BREAK to the computer (you might be able to program this to send something else) and then keeps going. (I think the terminal does xon/xoff when necessary.) Left off the list is for it to scroll the dialog area up. It seems to scroll if you have typed something within the last page, but if the computer's just dumping stuff out at you, it will clear the screen regularly. (I did a "cat /usr/dict/words" on it and it really weirded out - cleared the screen for the first several screenfulls, then started flickering a few characters in the upper left corner, then when I hit DEL to abort, every time I hit del it redrew the screen, one line further in the dictionary! Eventually it got into a mode where it printed lines of the dictionary out, scrolling properly, at about 600 baud (I was was running at 9600) and then printed all the output from my hitting DEL.) Here is the termcap I came up with. Only the vanilla entry is tested. The screen size for the non-dialog area is probably wrong - I don't think the number of lines in that area is an integer! # The 4110 series may be a wonderful graphics series, but they make the 4025 # look good for screen editing. In the dialog area, you can't move the cursor # off the bottom line. Out of the dialog area, ^K moves it up, but there # is no way to scroll. Xs|4112|4113|4114|tek4112|tektronix 4110 series:\ :le=^H:cr=^M:nl=^J:do=^J:bl=^G:bs:am:cl=\ELZ:li#34:co#80: Xt|4112-nd|4112 not in dialog area:up=^K:ns:cl=\E^L:tc=4112: Xu|4112-5|4112 in 5 line dialog area:li#5:tc=4112: ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.