Rod, at 08:47 on Feb 12 1996, you wrote to Bill Grimsley...

BG> Apparently it's only Paul who considers it a major problem anyway.

RS> He didnt say it was a major problem, just that it was a bug or stuffed
RS> by design. I agree with him, its just too quirky and counter intuitive.

Then why has he been carrying on as if civilisation was about to end ?  If
he'd bothered reading the manual as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, most
of these problems would never have occurred.

RS> You can certainly justify doing things like that if there is a good
RS> operational reason to do that, but in this case there isnt even any
RS> good reason to do it like that. AND if you choose to do it like that
RS> for a good reason, you MUST document the quirk very thoroughly to
RS> minimise the risk of it repeatedly biting people on the bum. USR doesnt.

And that is the one thing with which I'll agree, the lack of documentation.

RS> It does appear that USR may well have had that quirky approach
RS> to ATZ using the NVRAM port speed for quite some time, hard to
RS> check, but it still makes no sense to do it that way.

Well it's certainly done that way on my old Courier HST, vintage 1988.

BG> Aside from Paul, who still considers it to be a bug.  :)

RS> Well, its arguable if its a bug or designed like that. And if only USR
RS> does that, its only not a bug if the explicitly chose to implement the ATZ
RS> like that. Its not clear if they did that on purpose or it just happened
RS> like that. In fact, since its not documented unambiguously, it seems rather
RS> unlikely the chose to do it differently to everyone else on purpose.

Given that they've been doing it that way for at least 9 years, I'd tend to
agree.  However, I also agree that the necessity of writing the baud rate
to NVRAM with &W after a change of port speed in the term should be far
better documented than it is right now.

Regards, Bill

--- Msgedsq/2 3.20