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30 years of GNU30 years of GNUPosted Sep 27, 2013 13:02 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018)In reply to: 30 years of GNU by tialaramex Parent article: 30 years of GNU
> Terminal-independent display support
Maybe the fact that the system would work on displays of any resolution?
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30 years of GNU Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:11 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] No, this was 1983. People did work on terminals, and those terminals came in an unbelievable number of varieties. There was a period of time where you could determine people's relative status by seeing who had a vt100 in their office, and who was pounding on an ADM3. Making software work transparently on all those terminals was a real challenge, to the point that the original curses library was actually a significant contribution; rms was certainly thinking about the continuation of that work.There must certainly be some old /etc/termcap files out on the net. Reading the comments found therein used to be a way to get a, shall we say, graphic description of just how annoying some terminals were... Kids these days have no culture...:)
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 29, 2013 13:05 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
We had an old Unix machine (I forget what variety) in our department where I was a student in the mid 1990s which came with five terminals with green plain-text screens (VT100 compatible). It was kept in the common student area but we had at least one professor who would only ever use those terminals for sending email (he used computers for little else), because he didn't know how to use these newfangled window-based thingies. Alas, the machine was eventually retired...
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 29, 2013 17:42 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Even as late as the early 90s (when I joined the UNIX scene), we still had quite a mix of terminals and terminal emulations that made curses and proper TERMCAP settings very important. At the university I attended, I encountered, among other things:
I guess the main difference by the time I got there was that everything was shifting to terminal emulators on PCs and Macs as opposed to dedicated terminals. We still had many dedicated terminals, but by the time I left, most everything was on a PC or Mac in some form.
30 years of GNU Posted Oct 3, 2013 22:04 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]
Amazing, just noticed no /etc/termcap on my ubuntu system, stty is still there :)
By chance at this very moment I am looking at a 2 page "Data Processing Master Plan" from 1984 for our college which surfaced during office reorganization today. The document brags about the DEC 11/70, the number of student terminals, a possible upgrade to a VAX 11/750, going from Fortran IV to Fortran 77, adding another operating system "such as UNIX", and replacing the terminals with microcomputers.
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:14 UTC (Fri) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]
I think he was actually talking about serially-attached terminals (vt100/vt220/etc.) and something like terminfo to support text output on all types of terminals, where software doesn't need to be written with a specific terminal (later: terminal emulator) in mind.
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