What's the best RS-232 terminal?

From: Roger Ivie <IVIE_at_cc.usu.edu>
Date: Mon Oct 11 10:54:57 1999

> Anybody have a favorite? Why?

My favorites are: Heath H-19, DEC VT-52, and DEC VT-220.

Unfavorites are:

- VT-100. It just doesn't have enough compute power. Since I'm a CP/M
  WordStar fanatic, requiring XON/XOFF on the console port because the
  terminal is underpowered is very annoying (^Q and ^S are very important
  keys in WordStarland).

- Anything by Televideo. Televideo keyboards and I don't get along. The
  touch is too heavy. I press CONTROL [ for escape because I use so many
  different keyboards and that moves around less than the ESC key, but the
  Televideo terminals insist on sending ^] no matter how I'm holding the
  shift key down.

- Terminal emulators running on PCs. Seems like there's always some
  annoying quirk they get wrong. For example, MS-DOS KERMIT didn't play
  nice with K52 on RT-11 because K52 likes to move the cursor to the 25th
  line if it decides not to move the cursor at all; a real VT-52 doesn't
  have a 25th line, but KERMIT does. Another example: PCCONS under NetBSD
  goes into graphics mode the first time I telnet into a VMS machine to
  read my mail. I don't know why.

Roger Ivie
ivie_at_cc.usu.edu
Received on Mon Oct 11 1999 - 10:54:57 BST