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0 pointsGekkePrutser4y ago0 comments

Uhmmm try running your terminal at 9600 baud, and see how quickly you get bored with it :) And that's 4 times as fast.

I did this for a while recently because I needed to access something over a serial port and it was not fun. 1200 is really slow.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

dusted4y ago· 3 in thread

1200 is not too bad on a bbs, I'm often doing that on my c64. 300 is slow!

I used 9600 setting up an rs/6000 last week, and it was fast enough that I didn't notice.

I live in a weird alternate universe.

GekkePrutserOP4y ago

Not that weird, I still have a bunch of SPARC Netras with serial ports only (no video) and several HP-UX boxes <3

I love that old stuff, and figuring out how to use their boot managers etc. On the Netras the configuration is actually stored on a smart card. Very cool.

ipaddr4y ago

300 you have to wait a little for text but 150 was really slow. When I got my 2400 and 9600 things were crazy fast.

evilbob934y ago

One day in the mid 1980s we were checking the speeds available in our VT100 terminals. For fun we dropped it down to 150 to see what that was like. It was so slow that when you hit the delete key, you could watch it backspace, type a space, then backspace again.

ericbarrett4y ago· 1 in thread

This slow speed is one of the reasons the curses library and its descendants try to only repaint small sections of the screen using escape codes to move the cursor. Ironically it's also quite helpful with some modern terminals that are very heavyweight on graphical (pixel) redraws.

E.g. I can refresh a TUI app using MacOS Terminal.app 30x a second using ncurses; but a naive wipe/redraw at that rate produces visible flickering and artifacts.

GekkePrutserOP4y ago

That's true, though it really surprised me how slow it felt.

In the end I pumped the terminal speed up to 115k2 and it still felt very slow. Especially quickly paging through logfiles with 'less'. I remember spending part of my college days on green screen 9600 baud terminals (before they bought enough X terminals for everyone) and they felt snappy back in the day. And there was already a lot of TUI stuff going on back then. And in those days I didn't even know about gnu screen (or today's tmux) yet!

I think I've just gotten spoilt with today's computer performance.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

6 comments · 2 top-level

dusted4y ago· 3 in thread

1200 is not too bad on a bbs, I'm often doing that on my c64. 300 is slow!

I used 9600 setting up an rs/6000 last week, and it was fast enough that I didn't notice.

I live in a weird alternate universe.

GekkePrutserOP4y ago

Not that weird, I still have a bunch of SPARC Netras with serial ports only (no video) and several HP-UX boxes <3

I love that old stuff, and figuring out how to use their boot managers etc. On the Netras the configuration is actually stored on a smart card. Very cool.

ipaddr4y ago

300 you have to wait a little for text but 150 was really slow. When I got my 2400 and 9600 things were crazy fast.

evilbob934y ago

ericbarrett4y ago· 1 in thread

E.g. I can refresh a TUI app using MacOS Terminal.app 30x a second using ncurses; but a naive wipe/redraw at that rate produces visible flickering and artifacts.

GekkePrutserOP4y ago

That's true, though it really surprised me how slow it felt.

I think I've just gotten spoilt with today's computer performance.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse