Why not Multics? (was Re: BSD tty security, part 3: How to Fix It)

[Barry Margolin]

In article <00673676139 at elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> elg at elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) writes:
>One really needed thing was
>a standard display handling library. I don't remember whether one was ever
>written (something along the lines of termcap/curses), but if so, I never
>saw any software that used it.

You apparently haven't used Multics since about 1982.  At about that time
we introduced the Video System and the Menu Facility.  The Video System is
a curses-like library for doing windowed I/O to character-oriented display
terminals.  It includes a window_io_ I/O module that replaces tty_,
implementing Emacs-style editing of input lines (complete with
extensibility, with the extensions being writable in PL/I).  The Menu
Facility is a client of the Video System, and implements a pretty nice menu
library.  Both the Video System and the Menu Facility have subroutine
interfaces for programs to use, and a command interface for exec_com
scripts.

When the Video System was released, a menu-oriented user interface to the
mail system was included, and it was called Executive Mail (on the theory
that non-technical users would use Multics for email if a simple UI were
provided).  Later there was a menu interface to the Forum conferencing
system, called Executive Forum.  These may have been the only released
application programs that depended on the Video System (Emacs uses the
Video System if it's turned on, but uses its own terminal description files
when the terminal is in standard mode, because its programmed terminal
descriptions are more powerful than the table-driven Video System), but I
know that they were very popular in user-written applications (there would
have been more shipped video applications if we included games in Multics
releases).

-- 
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar