info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (03/01/85)
From: engvax!KVC@cit-vax
Boy, do I hate admitting defeat....
I hope there weren't too many people out there who were too excited about
our plans to attempt to replace the SCR (old-fashioned) terminal package
with a transparent SMG interface... In any case, the effort seems to have
failed. For one thing, the principle author (Dan Newman) has run off to
Budapest for a few months.
In any case, even before Dan jumped ship, the project ran into some immense
problems. The thing seems to work ok with two major exceptions. First of all,
user interaction is a little screwed up. For example, if you run PHONE,
everything looks ok until you start typing things at the phonee. Intead of
the nice characters you are typing, everything you type comes out as a <SPACE>.
This looks like a bug that can be either fixed or worked around. The person
who's picked up the project after Dan is looking into it even as we speak.
The other problem is much worse. First of all, I'd like to meet whoever wrote
MONITOR... I have a few things to say to 'em! :-)
It appears that a SMG interface that looks like SCR can never be made to work
right with MONITOR. The pile inserts it's own damn escape sequences into the
text it sends to the terminal. This is to get VT-100 line drawing, which
SCR did not provide. The problem is that when you start sending stuff like that
out through SMG, it hates you. Even if you put it into decode-the-VT100-escape-
sequences-I-am-sending-you-and-emulate-them-in-whatever-way-your-tiny-little-
mind-knows-best mode, it hates you. I appears that DTVESIASYAETIWWYTLMKB
mode doesn't know everything it should. Perhaps it only speaks ANSI?
In any case, there are some problems. If we can get the I/O working with PHONE,
I guess we'll go ahead and provide anyone that wants with a copy. Be aware,
however, that there are going to be problems with it, especially if you do what
MONITOR does.
/Kevin Carosso engvax!kvc @ CIT-VAX.ARPA
Hughes Aircraft Co.
ps. Yes, I know that if you tell MONITOR you are a VT52 it no longer
sends out those nasty sequences, but the whole point here was to support
terminals without MONITOR knowing or caring what you were. Maybe it
can be fooled for foreign terminals, but it still won't work right on
a VT100 and you cannot have SCR and SMG around at the same time since
SCRSHR has to be installed.