Gavin
With practise, you can synchronise your eye blinking to the screen
blinking, that way if you get it right the blinking is canceled out. Of
course if you get it wrong you don't see anything, but either way, no
blinking.
Tony Knowles     [log in to unmask]
                 [log in to unmask]

----------
> From: Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Blinking (Was: QUERY  enhancement requests)
> Date: Wednesday, 1 April 1998 12:04
>
> 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.