What's the best RS-232 terminal?

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Mon Oct 11 20:47:05 1999

>Tony Duell wrote:

> Yes, but it's a positive pain when you have a lot of monitors (and/or
> all-in-one micros) that you need to _store_, not turned on. Round here,
> you have to stack things at least 3-high...

Jerome Fine replies:

But if you want to actually run them turned on when they are even two
high, other than a VT100 (which is what I still use for the first level), I
have not found another terminal (except for VT100 clones) which allows
stacking. In general, I use 6 terminals with 3 VT100s as the first level
and 3 VT220s as the second level. With such old systems as the
PDP-11 which don't have a Windows environment to allow more
than one screen on the terminal at the same time, I find that there
is an absolute need for more than one terminal at a time. In general,
whenever I am doing some editing on a very long file (more than a
1000 blocks), I usually run 5 edit sessions rather than have a hard
copy of the file. 4 edit sessions are for a READ ONLY copy of the
assembled listing and the 5th is on the actual source code which makes
the charges. One of the 4 edit sessions is almost always somewhere
in the cross-reference at the end of the listing which then allows me to
look at 3 of those references at the same time within the rest of the
listing.

I also find the other 4 terminals very useful during a DEBUG session
to display that portion of the listing which is being checked out.
The problem during a DEBUG session is that the terminal allows
only 24 lines at a time from the listing and once the program is
frozen within the DEBUG output, so are the rest of the terminals.
Having a total of 4 edit sessions with 4 different parts of the
listing really helps.

One of these years, I will connect another system up with TCP/IP
to allow a fast transfer so that I can use one PDP-11 within the
DEBUG session and the other 4 terminals on the other PDP-11
looking at the listing AND not frozen in place.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Mon Oct 11 1999 - 20:47:05 BST