blinking is evil

Robert Moskowitz rgm at htt-consult.com
Fri Mar 6 17:38:47 UTC 2009


Michael Hennebry wrote:
> After updating to Fedora 9, I used vi on an old mailbox.
> Most of the header lines were blinking at me.
> What's going on?
> How do I make it stop?
> If I find the inventor of blinking text,
> how slowly should I kill him? 

Enter the way-back machine..... To 1975...

I was designing the first online system for Michigan Department of 
Commerce for the Insurance Commission; for the clerks to maintain the 
records for the licensed agents. We had a Burroughs system with their 
block-mode terminals. The only options for text was: plain text, 
blinking text, reversed video text. I was the system analyst and the way 
they ran things back then, the programmers reported to different 
managers and 'knew' how to design screens, so they ignored my screen 
design specs. All error conditions were shown by blinking the fields in 
error.

So I asked those smart programmers to demo the application to the staff 
over in the Insurance Agency, which they happily agreed to (dumb fools 
that they were). You see the clerks were all older women wearing 
bifocals. So as soon as the first blinking field appeared on the screen, 
the heads turned rapidly away (try it sometime; bifocals make it more 
than twice as bad). Needless to say, my specs for reversed video for 
error fields was quickly implemented.

Blinking text should be relegated to torture chambers!!!!


Oh, I too was gunning for the guy that thought blinkning text was a good 
idea.





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