On Thu, 5 Jan 1995 10:55:27 -0500 Tony B. Shepherd said:
>I spoke to Ross once at a local user group meeting.  He was the first
>person I ever met to understand and see the benefit of termtype 11 on
>Series II/III in under 3 minutes.  And that was chatting in a hall, not
>actually trying it!!  In my mind, there are three steps for serial device
>problem solving: ask the manufacturer, ask HP, then call Telemon.
 
Can't resist relating a war story/nostalgic tale here, so excuse a little
noise in the bandwidth...
 
I got a call from a local company that had a recently-acquired Series 40
which was giving them atrociously bad performance.  The manager wasn't an
HP expert, and they were running some third party inventory control system.
They were advised to upgrade and/or add memory in typical fashion.  I then
agreed to come out and "have a look" and give him a consulting estimate of
what, if anything, could be tweaked.
 
I showed up and loaded SOO, Tuner, and some other toys, and things looked
reasonable from the console, so I asked to see the "slow application" in
action.  Aha!  Dumb terminals out in the plant (Lear/Sieglers).  Print a
line, wait a bit, print another line, wait a bit...
 
They configured all the terminals as type 9.  That used to be OK until
umm, MPE/V or somewhere thereabouts when termtype 9 generated a fixed .3
second delay on <cr>/<lf>.  Ten minutes to change to type 18, cut a sysdump
tape, a quick reboot at lunchtime, and we made a lot of people very happy
very quickly :-)
 
[\] Jeff Kell, [log in to unmask]