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Aucbvax.5896 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Thu Jan 21 16:50:54 1982 Terminal drivers on Unix and VMS >From decvax!duke!bcw@Berkeley Thu Jan 21 16:45:14 1982

This is in response to Terry Laskodi (ucbvax!teklabs!terryl) discussing terminal drivers on VMS and Unix. There are several errors of fact in that article which I would like to correct:

1) It is possible to change one's mode on VMS so that special characters are not processed. It is also possible to turn off character echo, without special privilege. It does require special privileges to be able to set terminal characteristics permanently so that all future users of the terminal will get those characteristics forever and ever amen. This seems like a reasonable restriction.

2) Although it isn't possible to change the meta-characters on VMS, it isn't always possible to do this under Unix either: the \ character is an example. This character can be extremely annoying, as there are times when it would be nice for the escape mechanism to go away so that it can be used as a normal character.

3) The choice of turning form feeds into line feeds is not a bad choice -- the number is computed from the page size of the terminal and is done for the benefit of hardcopy output terminals. You at least want the ability to turn form feed characters into something innocuous: many terminals use a single form-feed character to mean screen clear.

4) I'm not sure that you want a terminal driver which just dumps characters, even control characters, from the keyboard into a file. At least there should be a way to turn this off -- it can be extremely annoying. I have spent a lot of time on an OS (which shall go nameless, but I'm not thinking of Unix) which did just that, and when you tried to compile something you'd get lots of compilation errors ... and the offending characters were turned iwto ?'s. Getting rid of them can be a real headache. On the terminal which I had to use, generating extraneous control characters was just about the easiest thing in the world.

As far as terminal drivers go, I don't see much real difference between Unix and VMS. Both have some minor glitches and some minor advantages, but both are much nicer to use than a lot of software I've met.

Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University

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