There's escape problems :(.  I'll see if I can spin up a V7 box and see if I have any suggestions.

Warner 

OK. Here's the update. I set tto 7b in SimH (which is bad?) and ESC works. Then in vi, it only uses half the screen. Per Clem's suggestion, I ran stty 9600, and voila, it "worked" full screen. Yay!

Now, it's just a matter of getting ex/vi working properly as an editor. I can confuse it pretty easy once it's up and running. Either this version of vi's got some pretty awful bugs, or I screwed up the build, but at least the screen's cooperating better now.

So, is 7b bad and should I be looking for another solution?

Will