das@ecsvax.UUCP (05/16/84)
Here are some additional impressions on VIP Terminal. For earlier
articles, see ecsvax.2502, 2492, 2469, and rocksvax.412. This one
is not about 80/106 columns, so I changed the title.
Features such as toggling printer on and off, opening and closing
the "workspace" (a 7k RAM-resident file), uploading or downloading
to/from workspace or disk file (the latter may be up to capacity
of disk), are all controlled by "meta keys", the Commodore key
<C=> and one other. E.g. transmit from disk file is <C=>T, abort
transmission is <C=>A, toggle printer on/off is <C=>P. I have a
small problem with having the printer on line: When I am finished
receiving text I want to print, the last two lines or so are still
in the buffer, and neither toggling off nor the printer offline key
empties the buffer. The only solution I have found so far is to
keep the printer on line for a few more lines of communication than
I really want to print.
I recently uploaded a file from disk that was too large to fit in
the workspace. It was entered to "ed" in insert mode. The echoed
text on screen left a lot to be desired -- many dropped characters,
ed line prompts in the wrong place or missing, etc. However, I have
looked at the file from my TVI terminal (very steady communication),
and every character arrived at ecsvax exactly as it should. I noted
in my last article the double characters resulting from my "correc-
tions" of characters that were not echoed to the screen, but were
apparently sent correctly the first time. I conclude that VIP with
Vicmodem is quite accurate at transmitting characters (whether from
keyboard or disk file) at 300 baud, but it (they?) can't keep up
in echoing them to the screen accurately. I hope someone using
VIP with a better modem will tell us whether my problem is hardware
or software.
David A. Smith
Department of Mathematics
Duke University
Durham, NC 27706
(919) 684-2321
{decvax,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!das