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From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Subject: Re: [TUHS] VFS prior to 1984
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    > From: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>

    > Ioctl: the Swiss Army knife of system calls.  I thought it was a neat
    > idea when it arrived (much better then those primitive stty/gtty calls)
    > but now...

Like they say, when the only tool you have is a hammer...

Better syntax than stty/gtty, maybe but I'm not sure the semantics are that
much better. The problem is that, especially with devices, what the I/O
commands do is so widely varied that it's hard to fit them all under a
unified umbrella. Maybe some (e.g. asynchronous I/O), but not all.

	Noel