karn (06/08/82)
One thing I often do at home when reading netnews is to run a buffering program on my home computer, which connects my terminal to the modem. The program contains a fifo that buffers data from the modem. The data can then be sent to the terminal (at 19.2kbaud) 24 lines at a time. The line counter is also incremented when long lines wrap around on the screen. While I read the screen, Unix continues sending data into the buffer until a high water mark is reached, and the program sends a control-s to Unix. When any character is hit on the terminal, the screen is cleared and the next page is displayed. When the buffer count falls below a low water mark, a control-q is sent to Unix to resume transmission. When reading netnews through this program, I use the -p option. This program makes reading news on a (relatively) slow 1200 baud line much less painful, since the modem is being used more efficiently. I find that my average reading rate is less than 1200 baud, so that the buffer eventually fills to capacity. Having this much data buffered locally allows me to scan quickly through a sequence of pages when I come across a series of articles I'm not interested in. The program is written in BDS-C and does NOT use interrupts (although it would probably be more efficient if it did). I'd be happy to give anyone a copy of the program; if I get enough requests, I will post the source on net.sources. Phil Karn Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
martin (06/08/82)
phil karns sugestion of bringing the 'more' program out to the terminal or by using a more'ing tty driver (my first unix system had that) is the correct way to go. this allows for my foo.c and existing programs (diff, ls,od, etc,etc) to use it also. my original susgestion of putting more into readnews still stands, doing that is an fix for now. martin levy.