ADM-3A reminiscences - was Re: more shameless classic trafficking (NOT Sellam's stuff) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

28 Jan 2013

John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> wrote:
...
  On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 01:55:49PM -0500, Toby Thain
wrote:
 Can you expand on why you hated them? Was that
generic to glass ttys,
or just this model? 
 For me it was the lack of selective clearing  -- so doing even basic
 editing on an ADM3A (even just ^W to delete a word) over a 1200-baud modem
 connection meant lots and lots of ASCII blanks.  Annoyingly slow...
 VT100s were *way* nicer, and even VT52s were a step up (at least they
 had ESC K, and the arrow keys could be easily distinguished from control
 chars, so ^H means one thing and left-arrow means another).

I had access to a bunch of VT100s, ADM5s and an occasional ADM3A.  I also
didn't like the ADM3A because of its screen clearing difficulties. However, I
preferred using the ADM5s as I found them subjectively faster than the VT100s
(even after making sure smooth scroll was disabled). I never did any objective
testing but I put this down to the longer and more complex escape sequences
used by the VT100, especially when connecting to something that did a lot of
cursor positioning. As far as I recall, all would have been set to 4800 baud.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.