>> I'm looking at ssh to see if there isn't some way to speed it up for
>> cases like this, [...]
> It wasn't just the connection time.  The delay in passing data was
> so great that terminal sessions were unusably slow.

Did you try telling it to use arc4?  That's lightweight enough that
even a slow VAX should be able to keep up.  (If you're worried about
the weak-keys issue, use one of the "discard the beginning of the
keystream" variants, such as Ben Harris's or mine.)

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