Autzoo.1112
gripes
utzoo!henry
Tue Nov 10 16:28:22 1981
warnings, sigh...
I will avoid moralizing on the merits or lack thereof of last-minute
final-copy races with no time to spare for screwups, but it does seem
to me that these are exactly the sort of circumstances where a shutdown
sneaking up on the user without warning could be very upsetting.

Changing the warning to beeps on good-copy terminals gives no better
warning, because the message ALREADY contains beeps:  if the current
message would go unnoticed, so would a beep sequence.  And no, a
beep sequence is not guaranteed not to screw up the output;  it all
depends on exactly what the terminal is doing at the instant the
beeps arrive.  If it is in the middle of a multicharacter control
sequence, beeps will screw it up.  This is not speculation, it's
happened to me several times while tinkering on the Multiwriter.
There is NO way of putting ANYTHING out on such terminals which is
guaranteed not to screw up in-progress output.  It's all or nothing.

It seems to me that there is inherently no fully satisfactory solution
to the problem, and the current compromise is as good (or bad) as any.