From: mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton)
Subject: [TUHS] I swear! I rtfm'ed
Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 07:59:51 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <54A56EF7.60204@mhorton.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <54A561A9.6030808@update.uu.se>
The move was from termcap to terminfo. Termlib was the library for termcap.
There were two problems with termcap. One was that the two-character
name space was running out of room, and the codes were becoming less and
less mnemonic.
But the big motivator was performance. Reading in a termcap entry from
/etc/termcap was terribly slow. First you had to scan all the way
through the (ever-growing) termcap file to find the correct entry. Once
you had it, every tgetstr (etc) had to scan from the beginning of the
entry, so starting up a program like vi involved quadratic performance
(time grew as the square of the length of the termcap entry.) The VAX
11/780 was a 1 MIPS processor (about the same as a 1 MHz Pentium) and
was shared among dozens of timesharing users, and some of the other
machines of the day (750 and 730 Vaxen, PDP-11, etc.) were even slower.
It took forever to start up vi or more or any of the termcap-based
programs people were using a lot.
I wrote a paper about it for Usenix in 1982, but it seems to be lost to
Google. Here is a nice write-up Pavel Curtis posted about it with more
detail about the motivation:
http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix-source-code/research/1982/0711.html
Mary Ann
On 01/01/2015 07:03 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2015-01-01 02:29, Erik E. Fair wrote:
>> All those terminal quirks made writing termcap entries challenging
>> (I wrote a few), and made the comments in the termcap file interesting
>> reading for the frustration and cursing of terminal firmware authors.
>> All kinds of history of the evolution of terminals is captured therein.
>>
>> The removal of the ability to read the source is - IMHO - what
>> greatly impeded adoption of the AT&T "termlib" replacement for
>> termcap: they stopped distributing the terminal database source
>> (they distributed just the binary "compiled" versions), and made it
>> harder to write new entries.
>
> I was way to removed from the action to know, but why did people
> slowly move over to termlib? Was there really any advantages over
> termcap?
>
> Johnny
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2015-01-01 15:59 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 37+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <mailman.116.1420056874.3354.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2014-12-31 23:52 ` Johnny Billquist
2015-01-01 1:29 ` Erik E. Fair
2015-01-01 15:03 ` Johnny Billquist
2015-01-01 15:59 ` Mary Ann Horton [this message]
2015-01-01 20:18 ` Dave Horsfall
2015-01-01 20:11 ` Dave Horsfall
2015-01-01 16:01 ` Clem Cole
2015-01-01 16:11 ` Johnny Billquist
2015-01-01 16:59 ` Clem Cole
2014-12-31 16:25 Noel Chiappa
[not found] <mailman.110.1420006566.3354.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2014-12-31 10:37 ` Johnny Billquist
2014-12-31 11:13 ` arnold
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2014-12-30 22:56 Jacob Ritorto
2014-12-30 22:59 ` Milo Velimirovic
2014-12-30 23:03 ` Larry McVoy
2014-12-31 0:03 ` Steve Nickolas
2014-12-30 23:05 ` Warren Toomey
2014-12-31 0:01 ` Jacob Ritorto
2014-12-31 2:22 ` Dan Stromberg
2014-12-31 2:33 ` Mary Ann Horton
2014-12-31 5:44 ` Jacob Ritorto
2014-12-31 6:24 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-12-31 6:36 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2014-12-31 14:58 ` Tim Bradshaw
2014-12-31 15:31 ` arnold
2014-12-31 15:37 ` Milo Velimirovic
2014-12-31 17:37 ` Derrik Walker v2.0
2014-12-31 20:09 ` Larry McVoy
2014-12-31 22:25 ` Jacob Ritorto
2014-12-31 16:11 ` Mary Ann Horton
2014-12-31 20:14 ` Clem Cole
2014-12-31 20:45 ` Erik E. Fair
2014-12-31 21:05 ` Clem Cole
2014-12-31 22:30 ` Jacob Ritorto
2014-12-31 23:06 ` Mary Ann Horton
2014-12-31 23:11 ` Jacob Ritorto
2015-01-01 15:45 ` Clem Cole
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