[Info-vax] SET TERM /TTSYNC on ancient VMS versions

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-08-19 06:54:06 +0000, hans.huebner at gmail.com said:

> Let me try to sum this up:
> 
> Software flow control...

You want to use the flow control characters for other purposes, 
something which was commonly disallowed as it caused no end of trouble 
in decades past.   Virtual terminals didn't exist back then and 
mostly-reliable network sessions were a fairly recent innovation.   As 
for the folks that wanted or needed to use those characters back then 
and whether for interactive sessions or for binary data transfers, 
those requirements caused no end of trouble for the operations folks, 
because those folks inevitably got themselves wedged in odd states and 
— not kidding — more than a few cases were resolved by visiting said 
users' devices and pressing the Hold Screen key once.  Any quest to 
newly-experience ~thirty-year-old configurations comes with 
equivalent-vintage assumptions and requirements.  Either deal with 
those, and deal with the problems that might arise, or use a different 
characters and avoid the mess.  I have little sympathy for the whole 
approach here, as I've heard these same requirements for these flow 
control characters before.  All because somebody needed to use ^S, ^Q 
or — my all-time favorite for these in-band messes— ^P.   Yes, I had 
several folks that wanted or needed ^P, and that worked great for them 
until they happened to ^P on the console serial line of a multi-user 
server.  When mapping modern knowledge and expectations onto the 1980s 
here, and — given the vintage of the code and hardware— the assumptions 
of the 1980s are often going to prevail.  Either don't do that, or do 
it and expect there to be the occasional problems.  But for the 1980s 
era DEC gear and software, XON and XOFF were the flow control 
characters.  Or try these or other experiments with one of the other 
Lisp implementations that are (or were) around.  Lisp was marginally 
popular back in the 1980s, after all.  Though clearly not popular 
enough to keep it around on OpenVMS, though.  No, I don't have pointers 
to the other implementations (any more), but I recall previous 
discussions of options and alternatives from that era.



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