AT&T Joining OSF (actually: BD 3270s)

[Stephen Samuel]

>From article <1265 at mcgill-vision.UUCP>, by mouse at mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse):
> In article <381 at infmx.UUCP>, aland at infmx.UUCP (Dr. Scump) writes:
>> In article <1991 at stpstn.UUCP>, aad at stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) writes:
>>> One of my gripes with [IBM] is that they refuse to abandon the
>>> brain-damage of yesteryear.  EBCDIC.
>> And *what* is the big problem with EBCDIC, except that "it's not
>> ASCII"?
[some comments about non-contiguous alphabets and how suggestions that you
can't do ASCII hex dumps (?!)]
>> The thing I *really* can't get used to: having every character I type
>> (in raw mode applications, anyway) cause an interrupt, instead of
>> being able to key in a screen worth before bothering the host
>> system...
> 
> Why should this bother you?  How come you even notice this?  Seems to
> me it doesn't matter who handles it; *someone* has to handle your

> I've got over half of a VAX 750 cpu now doing nothing but hanging on my
> every keystroke, to mangle a metaphor.  A modern UNIX box is often
.. You almost make it sound like it takes almost half the 750's CPU power
just to handle your keyboard input.  Comments like that can scare some people.
A 750 may be 'slow' by today's standards, but they're not THAT bad :-).
 Running stuff thru the ethernet gave me a good idea as to just how cheap it
is to handle char-at-a-time keyboard data.
(can you say "cheap like borsht")
 Duping the stuff from our sun, thru a 750 to a 780 (about 1KM away) produced
an almost negligble load on the 750-- even with the load of 2 TCP packets
for each keyboard character (1 each, inbound and outbound).

UNIX (and most other ASCII systems) uses char-at-a-time input sometimes, but
you can often get away with having a front end communications processor (FECP)
convert things to line-at-a-time and only interrupt the CPU on buffer-end
or other special conditions.
There are many UNIX systems out there that already support that sort of
pre-processing AND ALLOW IT TO BE TURNED OFF!
 This is where UNIX has it hands down over an IBM-style system.  There are
lots of 3270 emulators available for UNIX system, but HAVE YOU EVER TRIED
RUNNING vi FROM A 3270???? -- I have... once.
 I think that the Amdahl people may know a LOT more about this.

In general: I'd much rather put up with the, relatively minor, cost of char-
at-a-time input than be stuck with the BrainDead'isms of a system that treats
terminals like card punches with a VDT attached.
-- 
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Stephen Samuel 	  (userzxcv at ualtamts.bitnet   or  alberta!edm!steve)