14 Jul
2011
14 Jul
'11
4:33 a.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
I liked the VT100 styling much more than the VT220 -
easier to stack.
Really. (at one place, we had an office with six VT100s - two levels
of three terminals - very handy for watching multiple stderr streams
at once - quite extravagant, though, as even the clones were costing
us $1600 each at the time).
I still use that same solution for my PDP-11/83 system
except that I mix the VT100 and VT220 terminals
with the added requirement that all of the bottom
layer must be VT100 terminals. The only real
problem was where to place the second keyboard.
When a VT100 was the top layer, it could go on
top. When a VT220 was the second layer, there
was enough room on top of the bottom VT100.
In my case, I use the additional VT100 / VT220
terminals under a multi-terminal version of RT-11
as the terminal for a KEX job to display the LST
file from MACRO-11. Four system jobs allows
a reasonable portion of the file to be displayed
which has the code that was just written and is
being debugged under SDX.SYS using a Mapped
RT-11 monitor. Alternatively, while new code
was being written, the other four KEX jobs were
able to search the current version of the LST file
for whatever was needed to be checked while the
new code was being written - as opposed to having
a hard copy listing. Having four additional KEX
jobs to show the current version of the listing finally
allowed a shift to a paperless mode of adding code
to current programs. I remember printing out LST
files of a THOUSAND pages or more for an RT-11
monitor. That part I no longer miss. Of course, it does
not hurt that the current disk drives on the PDP-11/83
are 600 MB as opposed to the 10 MB RL02 drives I
used even in 1989 on one project.
The solution was not even near to being extravagant
in my case since all of the terminals were acquired
at a very reasonable cost when they were disposed
of by the original owners.
As for running on the Ersatz-11 emulator, the six
VT100s are no longer needed. Ersatz-11 is able
to switch from one "terminal" to another by using
the <ALT/Fn> keys. The shift is just as fast as
when I used to turn my head to look from one
physical VT100 to the other when all six VT100s
were on the same desk. PLUS, there is some
hope that KEX can be enhanced to support
50 lines instead of just 24. That should make
a big difference. Is anyone interested in running
a 50 line KEX under Ersatz-11 to help with a
test drive?
Jerome Fine