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From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Compatibility question
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2023 13:48:09 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABH=_VSpLwCSAxYtYfiMatT+nmApbmBzVXL87eiAt+Y_KZx6mw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <17d9946c-6f41-4c56-9cb0-3218a2550299@ucsb.edu>

One problem that the VT100 emulators may have is that they behave
according to the published VT100 specifications rather than the actual
hardware behavior.

The VT100 had notoriously buggy firmware.  Alan Kotok, one of DEC's
early engineers, encountered some of these and was annoyed enough
about it that he wrote a program to generate a complete list of escape
sequences--legal and illegal--which he fed to his VT100 terminal.  The
results were highly entertaining.  Some perfectly valid escape
sequences were mishandled by the firmware and had behavior that didn't
match the documentation.  Even worse, some illegal escape sequences
caused catastrophic behavior, such as the terminal freezing with the
alarm continuously on--the only way out was to power-cycle the
terminal.  One particularly nasty escape sequence caused corruption of
the EPROM such that the terminal crashed on power-up or restart,
resulting in an infinite crash-and-restart loop that could only be
fixed by sending the terminal in for a factory reset.

Kotok published his results within DEC engineering and shortly
thereafter "email bombs" containing escape sequences that triggered
some of the milder of the bugs started circulating.  The VAX/VMS mail
utility had to be changed to filter out escape sequences by default.

-Paul W.

  parent reply	other threads:[~2023-12-18 16:34 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 42+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-12-17  5:55 David Arnold
2023-12-17  8:08 ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-12-17 18:04   ` James Frew
2023-12-17 18:18     ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-12-17 19:14       ` Brad Spencer
2023-12-17 18:48     ` Paul Winalski [this message]
2023-12-17 18:59       ` Warner Losh
2023-12-17 20:24       ` Dave Horsfall
2023-12-17 19:26     ` Dan Cross
2023-12-17 20:08       ` Warner Losh
2023-12-17 14:07 ` Brad Spencer
2023-12-17 14:47   ` Arrigo Triulzi via TUHS
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2023-12-17  2:01 [TUHS] " KenUnix
2023-12-17 18:13 ` [TUHS] " Seth Morabito
2023-12-17 18:23   ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-12-17 22:51     ` Mary Ann Horton
2023-12-17 22:59       ` Ron Natalie
2023-12-17 23:08         ` Warner Losh
2023-12-18  0:35           ` KenUnix
2023-12-18  3:24             ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-12-18 17:05         ` Paul Winalski
2023-12-18 22:29           ` Jon Forrest
2023-12-19  1:46           ` Dave Horsfall
2023-12-19  7:56             ` Harald Arnesen
2023-12-19 17:40             ` Paul Winalski
2023-12-19 18:07               ` Tom Lyon
2023-12-19 20:23                 ` Clem Cole
2023-12-19 21:31                   ` Paul Winalski
2023-12-19 23:52                     ` Bakul Shah
2023-12-20  0:05                       ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2023-12-20  1:03                         ` Bakul Shah
2023-12-20  1:32                           ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2023-12-20  6:05                             ` Wesley Parish
2023-12-20  0:15                       ` Mary Ann Horton
2023-12-20 16:07                         ` Adam Thornton
2023-12-20 16:22                           ` Clem Cole
2023-12-20 18:11                           ` Alan D. Salewski
2023-12-20 16:34                         ` Paul Winalski
2023-12-20 18:15                           ` Jon Forrest
2023-12-20  1:11                       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-12-20  1:23                         ` Tom Lyon
2023-12-21  3:53                     ` Rod Bartlett via TUHS
2023-12-19 21:34                   ` Rob Pike

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