rcj@clyde.UUCP (R. Curtis Jackson) (05/22/84)
Well, i'm up here at BTL in Whippany working for a couple of weeks, and I'm getting a chance to work on a 5420; that's nice since I have one ordered for me. Now for the bad news: I am running Warren Montgomery's emacs 4.5.8. The 5420 terminal descriptive file that someone extrapolated from a termcap entry does not work -- whenever you kill a line or open a line in the top half of the screen, the thing goes haywire (only the display; it doesn't screw up the data) and spews line numbers down the screen and on for another half-screen before giving up. Don't even ask what it does in split-screen mode. So I get this flash of inspiration and remember that the 5420 is vt100 compatible -- a look at the terminals file confirms that the terminals file for the 5420 is almost identical to that for the vt100 except for some of the fancy options stuff which is documented like this in the 5420 User's Guide: ESC[ps;ps j Set Terminal Options They have told you that the 'ps'es have to be whole positive numbers, but they don't deign to tell you in the *USER'S GUIDE* what arguments will do what. So I decide that since it is vt100-compatible that it should be able to do everything that a vt100 does without the fancy windowing multiple-scrolling-region garbage in the 5420 file. You get three guesses what happened -- yep, not a bit of difference; except that it was slightly slower because of the pad characters in the vt100 file. I hope someone can laugh at me and point to an obscure corner of the User's Guide on this one, or tell me that true definition of compat- ible is not what I envisioned -- I'll gladly be publicly embarrassed and humiliated to get this @#%#$% thing working. I just want to know how a terminal can call itself vt100-compatible when it does not perform in the same manner as a vt100 given identical inputs. Thanks for your time listening to this tirade -- you'll be helping a lot more people than me if you can answer this one.... -- The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd we13 ]!burl!rcj ...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj
veach@ihuxl.UUCP (Michael T. Veach) (05/22/84)
The problem is that after a region scroll the vt100 puts the cursor at home. Whereas the 5420 leaves the cursor where it was. I think that the 5420 design makes much more sense (why conform to a lazy designer that couldn't figure out how to restore the cursor???!!!!) There is a fix to emacs that does not assume the cursor is on the screen after a region scroll. -- Michael T. Veach ihuxl!veach
wcs@ho95b.UUCP (59577) (05/24/84)
I'm typing this from a 5420, with the original, finger-bruising keyboard (they've improved it twice since it first came out.) You really need the "General Technical Reference" to do anything useful; the "User's Guide" is really the "Non-Programmer's Guide". The back of the GTR says "For more information, call 800-323-1229", and the people on the other end are fairly helpful. The 5420 is not "VT-100 Compatible", it's "ANSI 3.64". They're similar, but not identical. There will soon be a much-more-VT100-compatible version for about the same price, probably called a 5425. Aside from repairs to some bad design choices, one of the major differences will be VT-100 line graphics instead of the TTY-4424 line graphics it now has. (Another possible explanation is that you don't have s standard 5420; there is a prom set out for EPIC that makes the terminal emulate a getset. If you can get to the terminal options menu described in the User's Guide, you don't have to worry about this.) Here is an algorithm for obtaining the "Set Options" sequences from the User's Guide: The escape sequence is ESC [ ps;ps j Where the first ps is the option number and the second is its value. ASCII characters, if any, follow the terminating j. To get the option number, turn to page 43 of the User's Guide. Number the options on the following 5 pages, in order (Speed=1, Duplex=2 ......Alarm=30) To get the option value, look at the "Selections" list. The *-ed option, which is the default, has value 0. Read down the list, cylclicly, and number the values 0,1,... . Thus, for speed, you have: 110 5 300 6 1200* 0 2400 1 4800 2 9600 3 19200 4 (This algorithm doesn't apply to setting the RETURN-key value.) -- The virtual keyboard of: Bill Stewart AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ ...!ihnp4!ho95b!wcs
jss@sjuvax.UUCP (06/07/84)
[aren't you hungry???] yes, but as someone has already put forth, the 5420 is *NOT* VT100 compatible. It is compatible with the ANSI standard (I forget the number) from which the vt100 *DEVIATES* in a few minor ways..... Why wont this gritching about the 5420 go away? It is a good terminal with its own merits and disadvantages, and people should probably consider it as such. It doesn't claim to be vt100 compatible. It claims to conform to the appropriate ANBI standard, which it does. Jon Shapiro Haverford College Haverford, Pa. The opinios expressed herein are solely mine, etc, etc...