[HECnet] Tops-20 ANONYMOUS FAL Preliminary Testing Results/DAP Query

Yes, Ange-ftp is mode is a bit annoying; particularly since each new version of Emacs seems to manage to break it in new and interesting ways.? I'm still trying to fix an infinite recursion bug in the version I have on the Mac.? Why use it?? Why *colors* (in other words, font-lock mode) and memory. As you may be aware, the EMACS under Tops-20 is TECO based, the TECO being written in an assembler dialect called MIDAS which will emit code for ITS, TENEX and Tops-20.? It is a pre-extended model, which means you are 'limited' to a single section of 256K, which is something like 1.25 megabytes, depending on how you slice it. If you are programming assembler, that is an awful lot of space before you have to resort to overlays.? It's a decent amount of data.? The text of whole novels will easily fit as (7 bit) ASCII; I have several from Project Gutenberg.? Where you start to run out of memory is commonly with multi-media and if you're me.?? It's not unusual for me to have 16 files open, flipping between them. On TECO based Emacs, you can run out of memory.? Not so 64 bit gnuemacs; it just keeps going and going.? This was a major driver for the FTP server rewrite. The PDP-10 memory architecture had an enhancement done in the early 70's to support extended memory, which provided an additional 4,095 sections of virtual memory or about 5 GB total. In the 80's, that was known as incomprehensible, 20 years ago, perfectly adequate and today, well...? Unless you are talking HD video, 5 GB is reasonable for many applications, including editing NTSC and PAL video. At the time, a colleague and I were considering rewriting TECO in MACRO to gain the advantage of that memory paradigm. Unfortunately, the university switched off of the (cancelled) 36 bit line to Unix.? First Digital Unix on a VAX 8650, the 8700 and then Sun SPARC machines.? They never trusted DEC again. gnuemacs has been ported to Tops-20, so there is even less reason to do it now, but I didn't know that ten years ago when I started as a hobbyist. Another reason was that I wasn't getting the performance I wanted out of the TENEX based FTP server.? I worked with it for about 6 months until I was advised that it would be better to just pitch it.? The new server easily gets over 6.5 Mbps, whereas the old one could barely get into the high KB/s.? I eventually figured out why, but I don't think the old one could be made this fast. The final reason was that I just kept getting annoyed that 'modern' graphical FTP clients had no idea of what the 20 was returning.? And if you know me, when it comes to computers, it doesn't take much to get me really annoyed.? I couldn't believe the junk I was getting over the control channel.? Lots of commands that are not in any RFC.? Looking at other FTP servers didn't help either; they were hopelessly broken. But now I can fool all but the very most brain damaged graphical FTP clients (unfortunately I happen to have one on my iPhone). Character mode FTP clients were easy. I'm actually thinking of implementing FTP over DECnet; the performance (in terms of processor utilization) would easily exceed DAP.? And it would be my kind of fun.