On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 at 10:20:07, Stephen Usher wrote:
(ref: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>)
>Hello Tony,
>
>>>Well, actually, it was 20 years ago tomorrow, but why wait..
>>Sorry, you snipped the context.
>>What was 20 years tomorrow
>
>Sorry about that, it was a reply to a thread on the list about a person
>getting their QL 20 years ago. Hence...
>
>>>I also got my QL then.
Ah - I knew that "20 years ago" subject was about getting one's first
QL. I misread your sentence out of context, and read that as I got "X"
and also got my QL - sorry.
>>>Do you still use my
>>>old terminal emulator program?
>>Which one was that? I was heavily involved with Tony Price's QuaLsoft
>>Terminal in the 80s/90s.
>>This spawned my BBS which is still running (see below)!
>
>Oh, it was actually an emulator of an emulator I wrote that I think only
>Robert Newson ever used. I wrote it over the summer of '87 after finding that
>the previous version written in SuperBASIC couldn't even cope with 300baud.
>
>It emulated the University College London BBC Terminal Emulator which itself
>emulated a DEC VT52 and Tektronix T4010 with the addition of BBC *FX commands.
>
>Of course, the overworked keyboard/sound/serial receive chip in the QL was the
>biggest bane as there would be constant lost data at anything above about
>2400baud.
Indeed. It was worse than that. The 8049 receive buffer could easily
get out of step, and only cured by a power down. Simple reset would not
cure. That was one of the reasons for QL Terminal, which coped much
better.
>The second biggest bane was that QDOS couldn't throw characters at
>the screen fast enough for anything more than about 600baud, which meant that
>I had to have a big receive buffer, which often filled (mostly 'cos I never
>got around to implementing a ring-buffer).
That was all solved with Gold and SuperGold card.
The supergoldcard QL can now cope with the superHermes 57,600 speeds to
screen pretty well.
Hermes was produced primarily to cope tidily with high input baud rates.
The QLs std 8049 simply did not handle in the input handshake line
correctly, especially when it was making sound. sH was a superfast
follow-on.
The modern sH equipped black box is quite usable at high baud rates.
sH can do 115200, but the QL can only handle file transfers a bit below
80k - so 57600 is the maximum sensible standard baud rate.
Tony
--
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tony@<surname>.co.uk http://firshman.co.uk
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