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From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: gnumacs bindings
Message-ID: <13332@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Wed, 23-Sep-87 00:46:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.13332
Posted: Wed Sep 23 00:46:47 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 25-Sep-87 06:08:54 EDT
References: <3590005@hpindda.HP.COM> <8709181153.AA08300@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <636@unmvax.unm.edu> <655@rna.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 28
In-reply-to: dan@rna.UUCP's message of 20 Sep 87 21:46:43 GMT

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.4 of Mon Mar 23 1987 on bu-cs (berkeley-unix)



Perhaps the wrong forum, but I've always had a slightly different
(possibly wrong) theory on the origin of some of the early Unix
terminal driver.

It's behavior was not entirely due to space limitations I don't think,
so many of us back in the V6 days sat down and implemented essentially
what you see today in BSD systems ourselves (if I remember right Dan
T'so, who wrote the note I am sort of responding to, and my group
exchanged quite a few versions of these things around the Harvard
Medical School some 10+ years ago.) Ahh, the conversations that would
be energized trying to find the ultimate tab delete routine (can we do
it w/o a stack of col nums?)

It was certainly not due to the times, such things were already in
other O/S's, even tiny ones like RT-11 (tho not terribly sophisticated
versions, it was obvious what was needed and how it should work.)

So why? Well, my theory is that there was an interest in not venturing
too far from IBM half-duplex behavior so there was some hope (and,
just possibly, internal PR opportunities) that it would all seem
natural enough to an IBM/TSO user (wasn't #/@ the erase/kill chars in
IBM's TSO?) Remember, one of the earliest uses of Unix was preparing
jobs for submission over an IBM/RJE link from an '11.

This can't be coincidence, tho I've never seen it in print.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University