Garbage on screen when using real VT100 on emulated PDP-11

Generally DEC systems used xon/off. Cable lengths can be a factor as well as bad grounds between units (term and system) but cables have to be long for that to take effect (50ft or more). Also the Vt100 was 8080 (later Vt102 was 8085) clones used everything on earth. The Vt100 had little hardware help for IO and video so the highest cost operation was anything that did screen controls (ansi escapes) as they were multiple cars and if the buffer was flodded before the escape was processed havoc would reign. There two tricks to help, one was slow the baud rate to 4800 or 2400, also adding nulls could help save for they could still crush the buffer. The other was tho switch the terminal to Vt52 mode (assuming the apps could handle that). Vt52 processing had lower overhead though they were less versatile. with all that said, it also relies on the PC/platform hosting the emulation where if that doesn't support hardware flow control then you plain can't use it. Same for software flow control especially if the host has latency in its response and also has large buffers.. That means by time the emulated 11 gets the xoff the terminal may be crushed. Allison