job control

[Mark Crispin]

     I hope that people who are in a position to influence the course of
development of the Unix user interface are listening to the issues being
presented and especially the comparision with TOPS-20 job control.  I've
encountered a lot of "NIH" when trying to lobby for this sort of feature
in Unix.  The argument goes like this: TOPS-20 is "obsolete", Unix is not,
therefore there is no reason to adopt anything from TOPS-20.

     Here's a couple of other things from my wish list.  The Unix manuals
need to be *completely* rewritten by somebody who knows how to write
technical documentation.  Unix documentation rivals Interlisp documentation
(guess what two systems I've been using a lot lately?) in its generally
poor quality and disorganization.  The indices are next to useless.

     As an example, here were two questions I had recently.  First, I wanted
to know how to find out what the Unix system thought was terminal type and
its parameters were (the TOPS-20 INFORMATION TERMINAL command).  I knew that
the magic "setenv TERM terminal_type" would set it, but I couldn't find a
corresponding getenv command or any help under keywords "setenv", "term",
"stty", etc. etc.  I still don't know how to do this.  Second, I wanted to
know how to set the width and height of my terminal.  My terminal type may
be "VT100", but it's a terminal emulator on a Lisp machine and the window
I draw is 62x116.  Another reason for setting the width is that we use the
same terminals on TOPS-20 and Unix.  On TOPS-20, software will output an
automatic newline at the end of the line so you do *not* want to set auto
newlines in the terminal hardware.  I wanted to get software newlines on
Unix as well.  My local guru said "it can't be done"...(another wish list
item!).
-------