5420 follies - sure this thing is vt100-compatible!!!

[R. Curtis Jackson]

Well, i'm up here at BTL in Whippany working for a couple of
weeks, and I'm getting a chance to work on a 5420; that's nice
since I have one ordered for me.  Now for the bad news:

I am running Warren Montgomery's emacs 4.5.8.  The 5420 terminal
descriptive file that someone extrapolated from a termcap entry
does not work -- whenever you kill a line or open a line in the
top half of the screen, the thing goes haywire (only the display;
it doesn't screw up the data) and spews line numbers down the
screen and on for another half-screen before giving up.  Don't
even ask what it does in split-screen mode.

So I get this flash of inspiration and remember that the 5420 is
vt100 compatible -- a look at the terminals file confirms that
the terminals file for the 5420 is almost identical to that for
the vt100 except for some of the fancy options stuff which is
documented like this in the 5420 User's Guide:

ESC[ps;ps j		Set Terminal Options

They have told you that the 'ps'es have to be whole positive numbers,
but they don't deign to tell you in the *USER'S GUIDE* what arguments
will do what.  So I decide that since it is vt100-compatible that
it should be able to do everything that a vt100 does without the fancy
windowing multiple-scrolling-region garbage in the 5420 file.

You get three guesses what happened -- yep, not a bit of difference;
except that it was slightly slower because of the pad characters in
the vt100 file.

I hope someone can laugh at me and point to an obscure corner of the
User's Guide on this one, or tell me that true definition of compat-
ible is not what I envisioned -- I'll gladly be publicly embarrassed
and humiliated to get this @#%#$% thing working.  I just want to know
how a terminal can call itself vt100-compatible when it does not perform
in the same manner as a vt100 given identical inputs.

Thanks for your time listening to this tirade -- you'll be helping
a lot more people than me if you can answer this one....
-- 

The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291)
alias: Curtis Jackson	...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd we13 ]!burl!rcj
			...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj