UNIX Futures

[Guy Harris]

> The one and only real thing which bugs me about system V is the
> total lack of job control. e.g. in the mail program and having to check
> something out .. fancy being faced with either writing your mail
> out (and later having to read it in again), or having to fork up
> another shell. With a big load up either of these options can be
> painful. The functionality of ^Z and fg is tremendous!
> 
> Come on, AT&T, give me job control and I'll be a believer.

To be fair, they do have "shell layers" which sort of gives you the same
functionality (although, since it does not permit you to stop processes nor
permit you to move jobs originally started in the background back to the
foreground, it should not be called "job control").  It does not, however,
understand that when a process gets moved to the background it might want to
clean up whatever it's done to the terminal (painted the screen, put they
keyboard in a funny mode, put it into graphics mode where putting "text" to
the terminal really draws vectors, etc.), and might want to re-do same when
it gets moved to the foreground again.  As such, it isn't complete.  (Please
save flames about how windowing is the only right way to do things for those
who can afford windowing systems; those of us with such systems can
generally afford them, but not everybody can.)
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.arpa	(yes, really)