alleged Disgusting kernel hack ( - (nf)

[System Manager]

It is interesting to see the wheel being reinvented, with corners this time.
The 4.1BSD driver and 'more' still pain me, although admittedly not enough to
do anything about it.
The Glasgow terminal driver stopped at the bottom of the page in 1977 and gave
rise to the current EUUG driver. Some credits are probably in order:

Glasgow (v6) driver: Emrys Jones and Bill Findlay
EUUG (v7) driver: Jim McKie

The size of the screen was part of the sgtty structure. Line folding and
page stopping was then trivial.
The v6 driver also had variable size tabs which was another feature sorely
missed when we moved to BSD.

On the other hand the reliability of 4.1 is so much better than V7 that
the terminal driver is bearable.

The other side of the coin was also somewhat tarnished by the need to modify
lots of programs to switch the pageing and line folding off. If you buy
binaries only there are obvious problems. There are two obvious solutions:

1/ Set up a standards committee to produce 'THE STANDARD DRIVER'

2/ make terminals behave intelligently and stop at the bottom of the page


The 2nd option does seem to be the best since the only thing the driver would
need to know is what the terminal says when it doesn't want any more output.

Looking forward to your comments:

Zdrav


Zdravko Podolski, Comp Sci Dept, Univ. of Glasgow, Scotland
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