From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Newsgroups: fa.editor-p
Title: ^S/^Q
Article-I.D.: ucb.1312
Posted: Thu Jun 10 01:10:41 1982
Received: Fri Jun 11 00:58:16 1982
Reply-To: ople

>From Goldberg@RUTGERS Thu Jun 10 01:07:58 1982
Welcome to the world of reality.  If this were a perfect world, hacks
such as XON/XOFF would not be needed.  A recent article in BYTE 
describes the RS232 non-standard and how computer devices can't
use it because the pin definitions do not have agreed upon semantics.
Modem protocols do not seem to allow *transmission* of states such
as "the timesharing computer is ready to receive another character"
except through character codes.

Of course, the implication that one therefore cannot put ^S's or ^Q's
in the file is wrong.  However, one cannot put them there by typing a
key on the terminal that sends a ^S or ^Q if the terminal will send
a ^S or ^Q to indicate something else.  The terminal could be 
configured to send some special multicharacter sequence when the
user types a true ^S/^Q on the keyboard, or the user could enter
these codes using the same kind of quoting mechanism used to enter
a ^C on TOPS20.  For a brief window, the editor would turn off monitor
level XON/XOFF and read whatever character the user typed.

To those who do not understand why some terminals need this protocol,
I agree that some that need it for 9600 baud could be reprogrammed
to run faster and not need it, but what if the screen sizes increase
to 132 by 120, etc.?  Or baud rates go up to 19,200?  And what about
letter quality printers that can't possibly keep up?

Boycotting devices that use XON/XOFF seems like a misinformed approach
to this problem.
				Bob
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