X Terminals for Sun hosts over dial up phone lines

[Judy Anderson]

In article <DANA.89Feb21094308 at dino.bellcore.com> dana at dino.bellcore.com (Dana A. Chee) writes:
>In article <2566 at antique.UUCP> hpk at antique.UUCP (Howard Katseff) writes:
>> [various questions about SLIP and X]
>I have a 9600 baud SLIP line from home, so I can give you a brief
>summary of what to expect ... NOTHING!!.  9600 is WAY too slow to run
>X over.  I have tried to run clients on the office machines, while
>using my home machine as the display.  Its painful!  The windows paint
>in little bursts, which makes you think you have a 300 baud modem.

>For a summary, it would be very slow going, X was designed for a high
>speed network.

I find that SLIP at 9600 baud is quite acceptable, but only if you
have your xterm (or whatever) running locally and use rlogin/telnet to
access the remote system.  I find that I need two windows up: One
local xterm with a local emacs running a rlogin'd shell buffer, so
that most of my shell and program interaction is done with character
echoing done by the local xterm and emacs, and a second local xterm
rlogin'd to the remote system, running an emacs there for remote file
editting.  I then use X cut and paste if I want to transfer a small
amount of data from a remote file as part of a command to the remote
shell (running in a local emacs) or vice-versa.  The remote emacs
feels like it's at 1200 to 2400 baud when nothing else is going on.
For heavy editting tasks I'll transfer the file to be editted, do my
changes, and transfer it back.  There's always some size of
file/number of changes ratio to figure out whether it's better to put
up with the slow response of the remote system or wait for the file
transfer.  You can figure on 7500 baud for file transfers.  One of my
co-workers wrote some scripts which compress files, transfer them, and
uncompress them, which gets you another 2.5 times effective speed.
Response goes to pot when you are doing a file transfer; the remote
emacs becomes completely unusable for that period.

My experiences combined with Dana's above show that you really need a
workstation on the other end of your SLIP connection; an X terminal
just won't do the job.  Maybe your company has a spare Sun-2 they
could let you have :-)

           yduJ (Judy Anderson)         ...!sun!edsel!yduJ
                  (617)784-6114         yduJ at lucid.com
   ('yduJ' rhymes with 'fudge')         edsel!yduJ at labrea.stanford.edu