[HECnet] Disallow login on DZ line in VMS

Have you ever gotten the impression that terminal support sometimes just 'happens' instead of being planned?? The amount of parameters and options that you can set on a line for Tops-10, Tops-20 and Unix, often with a number of ways of doing what appears to be the same thing, is truly bewildering. Aside from the names to do the job, I don't think VMS is any worse or much better than anything else.? There are plenty of parameters in Tops-10 that require about the same amount of explanation (TTY SLAVE and TTY GAG come to mind). For Tops-20, it is less intuitive; the only way to do this is at system start up.? Otherwise there are no interactive surfaces to do the configuration, meaning SETSPD has no offset in its entry vector for parsing from the terminal (which I find remarkable).? I /think/// the following line in SYSTEM:7-1-CONFIG.CMD would suffice: TERMINAL /XX/ [/- YY/] IGNORE-SYSTEM-MESSAGES IGNORE-USER-MESSAGES NOBELL SPEED /zz/ Notes: 1. NOBELL is key to prevent some kinds of gubbish from interfering with the application or protocol 2. Ditto ignoring system and user blat 3. The terminal should still be assigned as a _^C_ will cause a job creation 4. REMOTE is probably not indicated unless the device handles DSR (or carrier) 5. SPEED can be split between input and output, but is limited to 9,600 baud on a DH or DZ The application doing the device assign could set all of these itself, but would need capabilities to do some of them (I forget which).? You could then use NCP to set the rest of the LINE parameters, hopefully.? Since Tops-20 NCP can't assign a line, what you could do is have the job that starts the NCP issue an ASSIGN command beforehand (/after/ SETSPD and /before/ any logins are allowed). Kind of baroque, I'd have to say.? I'd also say that VMS, RSX and VMS user interface is probably more straightforward, in this regard (absent the goofy naming) Tops-20 appears like it might have had some hooks doing these kinds of things for application terminals, but I don't see any vestigial or otherwise unfinished code for the conditional, so I don't know what they might have done.? Intriguing... On 12/21/21 9:14 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote: