🚀 go-pugleaf

 
 
[Curiouser and curiouser]

At SARA, the Amsterdam universities computing center, we plan to
use VersaTerm as the terminal emulator program. One of the
reasons people buy Macintosh here, is its use as (graphics) terminal.
In Europe Macintoshes are delivered with the UK keyboard,
which has a somewhat different layout than the USA keyboard.
This caused severe problems with MacTerminal as the makers
of that program wrote their own keyboard-routines and did
not make use of the standard keyboardmapping. So installing
the proper keyboardmapping resources had no effect.
 
VersaTerm appears to have a problem with the UK keyboard too:
after localizing the disk all keys are at the correct position,
the return key = return and the keys 'z' .. '/' are ok.
The only key wrong is the spacebar. That key doesn't generate
a space but a number of null-characters instead! The number of
nullchars generated depends on the baudrate:
1200 baud:  the number of nullchars varies from 42 .. 43
2400 baud:  the number of nullchars varies from 84 .. 87
9600 baud:  the number of nullchars varies from 338 .. 351
There must be a little bug somewhere.
 
The VersaTerm distributed by USENET, the pre-release, did NOT
have this problem! 

A feature I miss is shortcuts for menuselections, especially
for 'Copy-Paste'. At SARA the mainframes are Cyber machines.
Communication with these machines is highly line-oriented:
editing a line is done "off-line", in your terminal. The entire
line is then sent to the mainframe. VT100 does not support
this kind of editing, it has no line-send mode. So using
copy-paste you can edit a previous command but it is rather
tedious. I'd like to edit a line on the screen in the standard
Macintosh way by selecting words, backspacing etc.
 
This message is sent as an article for I don't have the mail-path
to the maker of VersaTerm, Lonnie Abelbeck, any more. The path
is more than 80 characters wide, so it went off my printout...
 
Hope to hear from you soon, lra!
Rick Jansen
  {philabs!decvax!seismo}!mcvax!sara70!rick