mcmanis.mark@USC-ECLC (04/24/83)
From: Mark Moulding <mcmanis.mark@USC-ECLC>
Regarding the use of a thumb-pad in lieu of a trackball or mouse,
Apollo apparently thought a touch pad might not be such a bad idea, so
the keyboards of the newer nodes, as well as their new DN300 desk-top
node, all have touch-pads. If anyone ever comes out with a trackball
replacement for that little piece of rubber, I'd be the first in line
to buy one. I find it almost impossible (after playing with 'absolute',
'relative', and 'combination' tp modes with all sorts of scaling factors)
to make practical use of the tp for editing, getting between windows,
program input (with fancy OS calls), or anything! It's difficult to
locate a character precicely, or make long movements fast1
-------mcmanis.mark@USC-ECLC (04/24/83)
From: Mark Moulding <mcmanis.mark@USC-ECLC> (sorry about that last aborted message - garbage phone line sent a ^Z) In short, the tp (Apollo's implementation, anyway) seems inadequate at anything it is supposed to be good at. ( I didn't really mean this to be quite so scalding - otherwise, the Apollo is really a fine machine, and there are quite possibly much more reasonable touch-pads out there somewhere.) I suspect that any touch-pad will suffer from a similar fate, simply because of it's limited size (to be practical). MM -------