sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer) (10/12/84)
I have been using my PCJr as a home terminal for about a month now,
so I have a few comments. I only have bothered using them seriously
at 1200 baud, so some of my comments may not hold at slower speeds,
and all bets are off at higher speeds!
So far, I've used three different terminal emulators:
Kermit-86 (H19 emulation) free!
from Columbia
Univ.
PC/Intercomm (VT100 and VT52 emulation) $99.00
by Mark of the
Unicorn
Era 2 (VT100, VT52 and packaged with Era2
by Microcom IBM 3101 emulations) PCJr internal 1200
baud modem ($500)
All of these seem to work on the PCJr, the first two connecting to
an external modem to the serial port as COM2:. In general, the
emulation was OK for all of them, thought you are naturally limited
by the PCJr hardware--no keypad, slow-scroll, etc. I have had the
most experience with the PC/Intercomm product, only cursory experience
with Kermit-86, and have only recently acquired the Microcom modem
with comm software.
I would recommend trying Kermit first, simply because of the price.
If it serves your needs, great.
PC/Intercomm has two problems: first, it will occasionally print a
character twice on the screen, rather annoying and occasionally disruptive
to a neat screen display. This is easily reproducable, happening on every
screenful (or two) at 1200 baud. More problematic is the program's
interaction with the PCJr keyboard at 1200 baud. It really can't handle
simultaneous asynchronous input from both the keyboard and the serial
line--suddenly one's echoed characters can appear as blob of filled
characters on the screen, taking anywhere from two to 80 character times to
get "resynched" to the serial line input. This is especially bad when
using screen editors where a single character input can produce a large
amount of (often invisible) output. This probably is not a problem for
the PC, because of way it reads the keyboard. The PCJr has to interrupt
the CPU on every keystroke regardless of what the CPU is doing.
I haven't seen either problem with Kermit or Era 2.
I have only begun to use the Microcom Era 2 modem and its software.
So far, I am quite impressed. Its VT100 emulation seems quite
satisfactory, with none of the glitches described above. I don't
like its user-interface too much, being too full of "menus for
morons". In fact, it is a souped-up version of the "Personal
Communications Manager" from IBM (which does not include terminal
emulations.)
Each of the three provides an error-correcting file transfer
capability: Kermit provides "Kermit", PC/Intercomm provides
XMODEM, and Era 2 provides "MNP". I haven't used MNP yet, but
the other two packages work fine with the UNIX versions of
these protocols.
--
/Steve Dyer
{decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!sdyer
sdyer@bbncca.ARPA