VT100 and bagbiting

[JTW at MIT-XX.ARPA]

From:  "John T. Wroclawski" <JTW at MIT-XX.ARPA>

    From:     Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn at BRL-VLD.ARPA>
    Subject:  Re:  VT100 and bagbiting
    
    The VT100 requires NO padding even at 19.2Kb if you enable XON/XOFF
    flow control and if your so-called UNIX handles XON/XOFF correctly.
    Any really interesting video terminal could conceivably require flow
    control to keep its buffer from being overrun at high baud rates while
    doing time-consuming display operations, such as smooth scrolling
    which is a big WIN.
    
Well, of course.

However, any terminal which requires XON/XOFF to perform standard
video operations at a particular speed is incompatable with emacs and
a number of other programs and is thus unusable at that speed for many
people.

In some cases you can get around this with padding, which makes the
terminal more usable. In other cases (VT125, say), you cannot ever
completely hide the braindamage.

Since it quite clearly is *possible* to make terminals that do not
need heavy padding to run at 9.6Kb with all the video operations
needed by good screen editors, I think it is only fair to say that
those manufacturers who have not managed to do so have inferior
products.

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