BART@HDETUD53.BITNET (Bart Zorn) (03/17/87)
Subject: Ultrix and parity settings for terminals I am currently involved in implementing a 600 port Ungerman Bass network and doing so, believe it or not, I sometimes find my self being confronted with a Unix system. BSD 4.2 or Gould's UTX/32 and now even ULTRIX-32. I was very surprised to see that Digital's own ULTRIX doesn't know about the existence of VT200 and equivalents, at least when such a terminal behaves like one. Ultrix's login prompts with characters which have some sort of parity set and that results in a lot of multinational characters on my screen. This experience leads to my question: Has anybody ever heard of equipment and/or software which uses parity bits whith asynchronous communication techniques in a useful way? I know of terminals that display some error symbol when a parity error is detected, but I have never seen anything which does a retransmit or something like that. If there is no such equipment and software, can anybody tell me why parity is still being used? Bart Zorn (BART@HDETUD53.BITNET) Delft University of Technology Faculty of Electrical Engineering