SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (07/28/87)
I've been reading through the documenation for TIC version 1.18. I have two thoughts. First: could you include an option to "set interrupts off" (that would let TIC work with SSC clones such as the Microtek 622C <guess who owns one> that don't support interrupts? Indeed, incoming characters would tend to get lost when the screen scrolls, BUT many BBS's and some mainframes support setting pad characters (nulls) at the end of lines which prevents loss of true data characters. Dick Atlee's Kermit-2A has this feature and I haven't had a problem with file transfers up to 2400 baud (mainly because no screen scrolling is involved I suppose). Second: you may recall earlier correspondence we exchanged about a local bbs (since kaput unfortunately, so I can't test the new version) that somehow managed to send a duplicate initial block because it didn't support Ymodem and got confused by TIC's checking for Ymodem. It occurred to me while thinking about it that Ymodem may not always be wanted even when the host supports it. If the phone line is known to be noisy (and we've a few local bbs's that'll generate an Xmodem error about every six or eight 128 byte blocks) regular old Xmodem might be preferrable (after all if the expected number of errors in every 1024 bytes is 2, it could take all night to transfer a 40K file). It seems to me it could be handy to include an option to force 128 byte transfer blocks. Wouldn't that option have solved the problem I had with the bbs as well?