weird terminal emulation

[bouma@cs.purdue.edu]

    I have been fighting with the Symbolics terminal emulators for a
long time now.  I had an arsenal of patches that finally made the terminal
work reasonable under 7.2 Genera.  When I put up 8.0 I was hoping that at
least one of the emulators would work so I wouldn't have to mess with it.
None of them worked without glitches.  My patches no longer worked either.

    But I did discover a way to make vt100 work without any patches.  After
logging as a vt52, I load the vt100-am termcap modified for how many lines
my window REALLY is.  If I log in as a vt100 the window is always 24 lines
no matter what I do later.  Then I edit a file that is bigger than my
window, scroll up and down in it and insert and delete a couple of lines.
After this I load the straight vt100 termcap. Now everything works fine.
All of these steps are necessary to make it work.  Of course, I do not log
out very often!

   How did I figure that out?  How did the SA-Indians figure out how to
use curare?

Bill <bouma@cs.purdue.edu>