Changing the topic just a bit, John Korb writes:

>  A few times I've had to use Telnet to
>  reach some of the Navy's HP 3000s from home and I've grown to loath Telnet
>  across the internet (14 hops from home, typically).  The symptoms are that
>  the character echo takes from a fraction of a second to a minute or more,
>  all within a 10 minute interval, and that occasionally lines of output (or
>  characters of input) are lost.

John,

Let me say that the conditions that you describe are (were) fairly common for
the "old" telnet on the HP3000, but let me also say that I need to invite you
over for an enchilada dinner sometime.

Unfortunately, the only place in the world that I can demonstrate to you the
new telnet connectivity that's coming to the HP3000 is from my desk,
connecting to Adager in Idaho, 16 hops on the average away from us in New
Mexico.

The quality of the connection, night or day now, is nothing less than
spectacular. I purposefully connect via PPP to our ISP using a 14.4K modem
link -- and going to Adager through the internet has become significantly more
responsive than connecting to the same computer using a direct 28.8K modem
link. Modems packetize their transmissions also -- and when the line-
turnaround times are added in (as they always are), the telnet-based internet
connection is now more responsive and more pleasant to use.

Joe Geiser has also opened up his HP3000 to us also. But his situation is a
little different. We sit only a mile or so from one of the Internet's T3
backbone relay stations -- and Joe is in Philadelphia, which also has high-
bandwidth access, and Joe has a T1 into his office. The bottom line is that we
get very good bandwidth to Joe, although he's half a continent away from us.
But Joe is also on the current release of MPE/iX (5.5 PP4), not the new high-
resilency version of telnet that will appear sometime in MPE/iX 6.

Nonetheless, the telnet connection we get to Joe is just like the one we have
to Adager: amazingly quick and very pleasant to use.

The bottom line is this: keep an open mind about telnet. Host-based telnet is
going to get very good very soon.

Wirt Atmar