[ On Wednesday, October 18, 100 at 10:58:13 (+0000), dribbling@thekeyboard.com wrote: ]
> Subject: XON/XOFF
>
>   GW> Of course it is possible -- but you will anger all
>     > Emacs users who try to use your terminals!  :-)
> 
> Why, does Emacs depend on an 8-bit link?!

Yes, sort of.  It can make full use of ISO-8859 national character sets
(as can most programs in NetBSD).

Though more imporantly ^S and ^Q (which are the "standard" software XON
and XOFF characters) are very commonly used emacs commands
(isearch-forward and quoted-insert).

> For my application that would most likely cost more than
> screened cable.

Indeed if you don't already have metal conduit to wall boxes then
installing it is definitely going to cost more than just installing
good-quality shielded wire suitable for RS-232.

> I seem to remember 15m (about 49') as being the limit for
> RS-232C.

There's a big difference between what the original standards say about
the electrical characteristics and maximum tolerances of RS-232 and what
actually works in practice with modern line drivers and receivers.

(unlike SCSI-II and newer where the standards are more lax than most
physical systems can manage!)

>  If I were going further I would probably look
> towards RS-422 or optical fibre.

RS-422 is cheaper in some respects, but getting systems that support it
is not so cheap.  Running optical connections for normal terminals is
out of this world -- you'd be better off just running ordinary cat-3
cable and running 10baseTX to cheap low-end X11 terminals that you could
no doubt buy with the savings!  :-)

In fact you can probably buy a dumpster full of working 486 or
Pentium-90 machines, complete with ethernet network cards, for the price
of one decent new serial terminal and they'll all run MS-Kermit under
MS-DOS with TCP/IP as the port type and give excellent performance over
either that cheap cat-3 cable (if you've got UTP cards), or over
discarded 10base2 coax that you can re-install for almost nothing if
you're crimping on your ends....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>