Control W, control-O et al was part of dos-8.  It was all parts of the
early TOPS-10.  Control-T came from Tenex which later became TOPS-20.
If VMS added it that was much later, as it was not in the early editions.


Steve Zimmerman added  Control-T and all of Tenex tty features to an early
Masscomp RTU.  I think Sam Added to a later version of BSD I believe.

My favorite story was that the Stanford folks modified the TOPS-20 “LOTS”
system to change what control-T returned depending on the load average. The
default would say RUNNING.  LOTS reported JOGGING, WAlKING CRAWLING. But
the Adminstration made them remove the hack because it most often reported
DYING

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Mon, Apr 8, 2024 at 11:03 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the timing and rationale for
> the introduction of “word erase” functionality to the kernel terminal
> driver. My surface skim earlier leads me to believe it came to Unix
> with 4BSD, but it was not reincorporated into 8th Edition or later,
> nor did it make it to Plan 9 (which did incorporate ^U for the "line
> kill" command).  TOPS-20 supports it via the familiar ^W, but I'm not
> sure about other PDP-10 OSes (Lars?).  Multics does not support it.
> VMS does not support it.
>
> What was the proximal inspiration?  The early terminal drivers seem to
> use the Multics command editing suite (`#` for erase/backspace, `@`
> for line kill), though at some point that changed, one presumes as
> TTYs fell out of favor and display terminals came to the fore.
>
>         - Dan C.
>