8 bit I/O vs 4BSD

[Henry Spencer]

> Speaking of flow control, has anyone ever thought about how much
> problems using in-band data for this has caused?  If terminals had
> hardware flow control, we might not have kludges like ...

It's hard to make hardware flow control work over phone modems that only
support in-band data.  Or over any long-propagation-delay network, unless
you use positive control ("ok, send me N more bytes") rather than negative
control ("stop!  my buffers are full!").  Note that many of the ASCII
control characters, including DC1 and DC3 (XON and XOFF), are explicitly
reserved for this sort of control function.  That is, they technically
are *not* "in-band data", and people who use them as such do so at their
own risk.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry