aliza@c3pe.UUCP (Aliza R. Panitz) (04/12/88)
Ake Olofsson relates a tale about a man not reading his e-mail due to a printer malfunction, and says: > > Today I know that his represents a very common opinion among ordinary > users - a lot of people don't like CRT-reading. At work some of our workstations have 43-line crt's (EGA). It makes an UNBELIEVABLE difference in the ease of getting work done, in all kinds of tasks, from working on source code to editing my latest technical specification. 24 lines is a real limit once you know something better. Ten years from now I will consider 43 lines archaic. Technology isn't ready for casual reading online. > [one reason for the difficulty of reading from the CRT] has to do with > the early or peripheral visual stages of the reading process. A lot > of research has found that, even for highly experienced subjects, > proof-reading (quite a familiar task to most academics) is slightly > slower on standard CRT displays than on paper. I used to work at a typesetting house. The vast majority of my group's work consisted of updating pages of loose-leaf legal manuals as laws changed. Our typical procedure was: 1) Run off "old" script (text and formatting commands mixed) 2) Mark corrections on printout. 3) Edit the script on the CRT, and generate new printout. 4) Proofread new printout against manuscript. 4.5) If errors, GOTO step 2 5) Generate typeset camera copy (EXPENSIVE) 6) Check camera copy vs. manuscript If we were VERY pressed for time, step 2 could be skipped. but this was an emergency expedient only. On the other side of the coin, when I've worked at litigation support databases, (reading documents and filling out forms) I've found that my accuracy and speed and EASE OF WORK were much better on terminals than on paper... But that is partly accounted for by the physical work of lifting a pencil. Aliza
delatizk@bbn.com (Jonathan Delatizky) (04/20/88)
The increase in productivity supported by a large screen is very substantial, at least in my case. I am fortunate to have a Sun 3/50 on my desk; I have the screen configured with a 68-line emacs window on one side, and two terminal windows on the other. The larger of these is 66 lines. And of course I can pop up additional windows whenever I like. This makes reading mail (or news) very pleasant. More importantly, I can write and edit code in a large window probably twice as fast as I ever could on a 24 line terminal. I can generally get by without any hardcopies. For writing text, the large screen makes it easy to retain a sense of context at all times, again without any paper. The small screen has been my only real gripe with the design of the Macintosh, which in all other respects is a much more pleasant environment for working productively than any terminal or PC of comparable cost. Let's hope for the day when all terminals provide 48 or more lines. Jonathan Delatizky