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.)