DUMP is too verbose

[Dan Razzell]

What is the purpose of DUMP periodically repeating its prompts to
mount a new tape, ask for retry, etcetera? Seems redundant to me, and not
in the spirit of Unix, to nag the user in this way and fill the terminal
with verbiage. I've seen this technique elsewhere (eg. VMS BRU,) which
might historically explain, but not excuse, its adoption in Unix.

If calling attention is all that's needed, why not just beep the terminal?
It might be necessary to put out a carriage return along with the beep to
keep the terminal buffer from overfilling.

On the same subject, DUMP's prompt lines are too long; couldn't they be
trimmed to 80 (or even 72) characters to avoid ugly wrapping?

The machine room environment is noisy enough without adding visual noise,
n'est-ce pas? :-)
-- 
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      .^.^.      Dan Razzell <razzell at vision.ubc.cdn>
     . o o .     Laboratory for Computational Vision
     . >v< .     University of British Columbia
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