Re: Developing PLATOTerm64, Flow Control woes.

We're definitely talking about different scenarios, so it's getting a little pointless.

Let's just leave it that I disagree with your assertion that "End to end xon/xoff will never be reliable over the internet", i.e. reliable communication between two RS-232 devices using only XON/XOFF flow control over bridges connected via the internet or a LAN is not possible.

Every one of these devices I've seen offers XON/XOFF flow control and I find it hard to believe that none of them actually works.

m

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "smf" <smf@null.net>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2018 6:23 PM
Subject: Re: Developing PLATOTerm64, Flow Control woes.


> On 04/07/2018 22:55, Mike Stein wrote:
> 
>> We may be talking about different scenarios; I assumed that we had 
>> control over the protocols used at both ends and could configure them 
>> however necessary in order to let two RS-232 devices, at least one of 
>> which could *only* use XON/XOFF flow control, communicate over a LAN 
>> or WAN.
> 
> I'm not sure why you would limit yourself, when sending those xon/xoff 
> characters over the internet is at best irrelevant and at worse going to 
> cause you problems.
> 
> You want to have as much data as possible sitting in the rs232 transmit 
> buffer on the bridge, so it starts being sent as soon as you send an 
> xon. Telling the other end to hold off sending, just because your RS232 
> device has a full buffer is going to introduce a lot of latency.
> 
>> There are certainly fewer problems when the bridges at both ends are identical and designed to work with each other.
> 
> You're lucky if you have the luxury of getting identical hardware at 
> both ends. Once you have a reasonable sized install base and a 
> competitor brings out a much cheaper model just before your customer 
> merges with someone, then in my experience you'll be making it work somehow.
> 
> 
>