Pagination in TTY driver

Jonathan Hahn hahn at AMES-NAS.ARPA
Sat Aug 24 05:21:50 AEST 1985


I cringed when I came across the first reference to tty
pagination at the driver level (actually, I think the first
reference was intended to be sarcastic), but then I recalled an
implementation I encountered that was somewhat respectable:

When pagination mode is turned on, the tty driver will
suspend output (a la canonical ^S) after it sends 23
<CR><LF>s to the terminal.  As long as pagination mode is
no, pagination repeats after output is resumed.

	^S	turns pagination mode on and suspends output
	^Q	turns pagination mode off and resumes output

When pagination is on, <BREAK> requests a new page/resumes output
(these days this might upset some terminal servers).  I don't
recall specifically, but I suspect that terminal input would
reset top-of-page so interactive terminal dialog wouldn't be
bothered with pagination.

This was implemented at Ampex Corp. on V7 and is on an old Usenix
distribution tape (<=1981, meeting location = Boulder, CO).

-jonathan hahn
hahn at ames-nas.arpa
...!ucbvax!atd!avsdT:jon	(I don't think this works.  Aside: can the ':'
				be quoted so mailers don't change it to a '.'?)



More information about the Comp.unix.wizards mailing list