Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!amdcad!crackle!tim
From: tim@crackle.amd.com (Tim Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: job control is a bug, not a feature
Message-ID: <25897@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 8 Jun 89 01:24:17 GMT
References: <16497@louie.udel.EDU> <11989@bcsaic.UUCP> <2775@munnari.oz> <798@gara.une.oz> <8167@boring.cwi.nl> <1989Jun7.224933.700@utzoo.uucp>
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Reply-To: tim@amd.com (Tim Olson)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Sunnyvale CA
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In article <1989Jun7.224933.700@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
| In article <8167@boring.cwi.nl> roberto@cwi.nl (Rob ten Kroode) writes:
| >I asked Andy some advise, and he told me that he didn't like the idea of 
| >job control in Minix...
| 
| Job control is a stupid, poorly-thought-out, ass-backwards excuse for a
| window system.  It's mostly just a way of interacting with multiple
| processes.  Window systems do it much better, since they provide central
| control of output as well as input, and if done well, it is transparent
| to user programs (instead of requiring ugly hacks in each and every one).

In a related question, has anyone else worked on "virtual terminal"
support for the console?  By this, I mean the ability to have multiple
simultaneous sessions, and the ability to flip between them with a
"hot-key", like F3.  I have seen this in other systems, and thought it
would be an interesting thing to add.

I'm not quite finished with it, but it appears to drop in very easily to
tty.c, at least on the PC version of MINIX.



	-- Tim Olson
	Advanced Micro Devices
	(tim@amd.com)