foster@nsc.UUCP (Jerry Foster) (04/23/84)
This is a word in praise of crosstalk XVI (rev 3.41). I am using an IBM-pc with a hayes 1200B modem and going dialup to a DEC VAX 11/780 running UNIX (berkely 4.2). Previously I was running SMARTCOM II and while this worked fine for file transfers, it has no emulation function and I was limited to being a "dumb" terminal. With crosstalk 16, full vt100 emulation is available for the pc. I am happy to report that with vt100 emulation in effect, all terminal functions (including vi) work as well as a real vt100 hard wired to the host. File transfers to and from the host work as well as SMARTCOM II, and they operate while in emulation mode or out of it. Emulation can be changed while on-line to any of the emulations available: VT100, VT52, Televideo 910/920, IBM 3101 ASCII, Adds Viewpoint, or Texas Instruments 940.
shanks@teneron.UUCP (David Shanks) (04/24/84)
<-bug food I too am using Crosstalk on the IBM PC. But while I am very happy with the program, I must report that it does NOT do a complete emulation of the vt100. Several things it is missing are listed in the manual. Among them are (I am speaking from memory) 132 column mode, double wide characters, double high characters and smooth scroll. There are also some things which the manual does NOT mention that Crosstalk does incorrectly. 1) It sometimes scrolls the display when it should not. 2) It does not ignore escape sequences which are not supported (parts of them appear on the screen). 3) It does not correctly handle some characters with more than one attribute set: a) Bold blink appears as bold. b) Bold underline appears as underline. c) Bold underline blink appears as underline blink. d) Blink reverse appears as underline. e) Bold reverse appears the same as reverse. f) There is no underline in reverse mode. g) There is no blink in reverse mode. I have a vt100 test program which can confirm these claims. The program is in the public domain (I originally got it from the net) so I can mail it to anyone who requests it. If there are enough requests I will post it to net.sources. In summary, while this review may sound a bit negative, I don't want to give the impression that I don't like Crosstalk. I do like it and I am using it (version 3.21 in TVI 920 emulation) right now to compose this article. I simply want to warn everyone that it's vt100 emulation mode has a few bugs in it. -- Dave Shanks ..!tektronix!ogcvax!metheus!teneron!shanks Teneron Corp. (formerly Computer Development, Inc.) 6700 SW 105th Suite 200 Beaverton, OR 97005 (503) 646-1599