dz@lime.ucsb.edu (Daniel James Zerkle) (07/18/89)
I managaged to install a vt-100 on ttyb with a Macintosh-to-printer cable. It works fine for most purposes, except it garbles characters in two situations: Situation #1: The login program. When you log in on the terminal, *sometimes* the line feed that is supposed to be sent to the terminal comes out as a little rectangle character. This means that, since the carriage return comes out ok, the "Password:" prompt ends up printing on top of the "Login:" prompt. Not an extreme difficulty, certainly, but intriguing and inexplicable, especially in light of... Situation #2: kermit in connect mode. This is a bunch of extraordinary weirdness. There is a big, fat network called the Broad-Band here at UCSB, and the NeXT is pretending to be a terminal on the network, so it can connect to assorted other machines. The vt-100 is on port ttyb, and the network is connected on port ttya. The garbled character problem comes up when you try to use the vt-100 to connect to the broad-band with kermit. Roughly 2/3 of the text that gets printed to the terminal gets turned into little rectangles. Needless to say, it's a little hard to read. What's weird is that kermit runs just fine from a terminal window on the console, and the "tip" program works just fine from the vt100. My guess is that kermit is messing up the parity of the characters it sends to the terminal (network runs 7 bits, even parity). I know that C-Kermit uses stty stuff to put the terminal in a rather weird state (crash it, and you have to reset the terminal). However, the characters kermit gives to the terminal work just fine, UNTIL YOU TRY CONNECT MODE. What's more, only certain characters get messed up, but others never do. For example, "n" always comes out fine, but "o" gets turned into a little rectangle. This is the version of C-kermit from University of Texas, with just a little "-DNEWUUCP" thrown into the CFLAGS in the makefile to make everything a little more compatible with the new uucp locking protocol (that tip also uses). Right now, the only workaround is to ask the guy at the console whenever you want to download a file from the network, while you struggle with "tip". Help!! -Dan