Getting the most from 'more'

[TAA at MIT-XX.ARPA]

From:  Tim Anderson <TAA at MIT-XX.ARPA>

    A simple pager in the kernel isn't going to work; it would have to know
    the state of the screen. One way to proceed (I'm not really advocating
    this, but it might be interesting) is to absorb termcap into the kernel.
    Then programs would deal with virtual terminals, all of which look the
    same. If done properly, it could be quite elegant; I'm not sure it
    would be Unix.
Now we're getting somewhere.  This has been done, is quite elegant, and
makes life much more pleasant for the user.  To say nothing of the
programmer.  The only reason this isn't Unix is that it violates the
principle of doing everything in C libraries instead of in the kernel;
in this case, it makes a lot more sense because the terminal belongs to
all your processes, instead of just to whoever happens to have the right
library loaded.  Basically, you get better functionality at less cost. 
If that isn't Unix, then so be it.
	-ta
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