Bruce writes:
> I discovered that users would be more patient if the "Working..." part of
> the message was made to blink. The blinking makes it appear that the
> computer is actively calculating something.

Blinking display enhancements are one of my pet peeves.  Not the use of
them, but the way that today's terminals and terminal emulators implement
blinking text.

The old HP264x terminals are the only ones that I know of which understood
that blinking text should not blink with a 50% duty cycle.  A 50% duty
cycle means that the text is visible 50% of the time, and invisible 50%
of the time.  This means that when you look up at the screen, half of the
time you can't see anything!  Coupled with slow blink rates, this makes
reading blinking text extremely annoying.

The old 264x terminals (if I recall correctly) would blink the text
invisible briefly every second or two.  The duty cycle ran something
more like 70% visible, 30% invisible, which made it much easier to
read the text.

All modern HP terminals (700 series) and Reflection do it wrong, along
with just about every other occurrence of "blinking" in the computer
world.  It's amazing that the concept of an asymmetric blink cycle never
seems to occur to anyone.

A quick look at QCTerm makes me think that Wirt got it right (which one
would expect).  I don't have a copy of Minisoft to try it on.

G.