On Sun, 05 Apr 2015 11:59:49 -0400 (EDT), Paul E Condon wrote: > > Times change. If one waits even a short while, they can change a lot. > When this terminal was new, a 'standard' terminal was a mechanical > teletype manufactured by Teletype Corp. in Skokie, IL. The generic > name for this 'terminal' was, I think, a 'glass teletype' Each > computer company had its own special glass teletypes that interfaced > to its computer. All proprietary. > > None of the glass teletypes had the very useful scroll back feature > of the real teletype that they were trying to emulate. Teletype > paper came in rolls. A single roll was a many meters long. It would > pile up behind the teletype as one worked. It could always be pulled > out and reviewed back to initial login at the beginning of the > session. Some people left the paper behind for someone else to clear > away. Others saved it, rolled up and labeled at their desks. > > It took 0.1 sec. to mechanically process one character, except for > carriage return. That took up to 0.2 sec. The placement of the > carriage return character before the non-printing line feed > character allowed the carriage to get all the back to the left before > a printing character arrived. It was in the design of teletype that > this cr/lf feature was baked into our history.
Interesting history, thank you. The IBM 3151 is a "dumb" terminal in the sense that it doesn't support scrolling backward. But my idea of a "dumb" terminal is a line-mode terminal, such as a mechanical teletype machine. The IBM 3151 is a full-screen terminal. You can run ncurses-based applications on it. You can use full-screen editors, such as vi. It supports high-intensity, underscore, blinking, and reverse video, though it does not support color. It supports clearing the screen. (It is a non-standard clear code, so the standard code used by (a)getty does not clear the screen. But the "clear" command works.) None of these things can be done on a line-mode (dumb) terminal, such as a mechanical teletype machine. It is more than a "glass teletype". -- .''`. Stephen Powell <zlinux...@wowway.com> : :' : `. `'` `- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/147246682.18737453.1428280689780.javamail.zim...@wowway.com
