spaf.gatech@UDel-Relay@sri-unix (12/04/82)
From: Gene Spafford <spaf.gatech@UDel-Relay>
Not too long ago, the folks at Xerox very kindly donated two small
Star systems to Tech. One of them wound up in our research lab
(School of Information and Computer Science). We've been pretty
impressed by the graphics and the print quality. The software
also indicates a lot of careful thought. However, I'm curious
as to a few points, and would appreciate comments on the following:
The Star is painfully slow to the point of positive annoyance.
Some of us have grown to hate that little hourglass cursor.
Xerox is (said to be) currently working to speed the little
bugger up, but an 8085A can only do so much. We have some
users who have stopped using the Star for anything not requiring
graphics since virtually anything else we have is faster.
However, these people are experienced computer users. I'm
curious about users who haven't used other systems before --
what do they think about the speed? Any ideas?
Anybody out there with Parkinson's disease or arthritis?
I'm curious as to how well you could use that mouse and
cursor to select small characters on the screen. How about
people with poor vision? One of our secretaries who is
using the system has to type everything in in a larger
font than what she needs to print because she cannot
see the small characters on the screen; somebody has to go
through later and increase the type size and reformat the
pages accordingly. Anybody else out there have less than
perfect co-ordination and vision?
Does anyone out there have difficulty knowing when to use
"copy" and when to use "move"? We've had some interesting
problems because there is no such thing as "read-only"
and someone "moved" when they should have "copied." Also,
some things copy but don't move, and some things move but
don't copy.
Anybody found why the system keeps crashing when you do
complex and wonderful things with graphics frames?
I guess the first two points might be asked of any workstation.
We would probably have use for another 3 or 4 workstations, despite
their current shortcomings. I guess it is a question of
what kinds of things are users willing to put up with in exchange
for perceived advantages.
Comments?