Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!onfcanim!dave From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems Subject: Re: interactive Trailblazers Message-ID: <15627@onfcanim.UUCP> Date: 9 May 88 00:15:45 GMT References: <10273@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <10277@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1988May8.000738.16103@utzoo.uucp> <3749@cbmvax.UUCP> Reply-To: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale) Organization: National Film Board / Office national du film, Montreal Lines: 28 In article <3749@cbmvax.UUCP> grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) writes: > >My version of the "Turing test" for high speed modems is whether you do >the same sort of things while dialed up over the modem as when you're >directly connected, or whether you put things off until you get back to >work/whatever. I have a Trailblazer (rev 4.00 ROMs) at home, and I find it almost equivalent to being at work. Sure, the output is a bit bursty, but the echo delay (even in vi) no longer bothers me. It's about the same as working via rlogin across an Ethernet. I find that when I feel I *have* to go into the office, it's never because the Trailblazer is too slow - it's because I need to look at an image, or mount a tape, or in general use hardware I don't have at home. The major remaining annoyance is that when I type my interrupt character, there may be 30kb of stuff already buffered up in the two modems, and I don't want to see it. If I hit BREAK, the Trailblazer flushes the buffers on *both* ends (kudos to Telebit for this option), but I haven't used the BREAK key in years and I'm out of the habit. This is a pretty insignificant complaint. (By the way, the Trailblazer has about as much bandwidth as I need (and as much as my terminal can handle) for text, but it would still be completely inadequate for looking at raster images at home. For that, one megabit/sec would be about the minimum for comfortable work. I don't expect to see that anytime soon.)