why is 3b1 screen so SLOW ?

[David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack]

In article <864 at hsi.UUCP> stevens at hsi.UUCP (Richard Stevens) writes:
>Why is the 3b1's screen so slow ??  

I dunno?  Is this one of those "Why did the chicken cross the road" questions?

>Also, what is everyone else using with Telebits, instead of
>cu and the (ugh) ATE package ??  The ATE can't even keep up with the
>1200 baud OBM and cu can't keep up with a Telebit.  The problem with
>cu is that its doing a read() of 1 byte at a time from the modem,
>followed by a write() of that single byte to the screen.  The system
>call overhead destroys its throughput.  I really don't want to have
>to write a terminal emulator for the system ...  (Is the ATE an
>AT&T product ?  I can't believe anyone let a package like this
>out the door.)

Well, I don't have a Telebit yet.  When I did have one (for testing)
I used ATE with it simply 'cause I didn't have time to set anything 
else up.  We've got people around here that use 7300's (1 meg with
20 meg disk models!) as terminals all the time using ATE.  It seems
to run ok -- at least they don't complain about slowness.

um, I suggest you check a little bit into what system calls are
available on SysV, especially one as old as what we got on
our 7300's.  The only way you can write a terminal program on
there is with the standard two processes, one read()ing and
write()ing from modem -> screen, the other keyboard -> modem.
The C Kermit does the exact same sort of thing -- with extra
garbage code thrown in to see if it needs to do any logging
and maybe even some code to handle parity conversions.

And kermit works really well as a terminal program.  That is,
so long as you use the right kind of termcap entry on the far end.


Me?  I'm thinking of porting dnet over to the Unix PC.  Especially
since I've got an Amiga at home as well and he's talking about
being able to set up a network of dnet nodes...  But right now
I'm using ATE 'cause it's really convenient to simply be able
to pull up the phone manager screen and hit enter at the phone
I want to call...
-- 
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy            <david at ms.uky.edu>
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