From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Arnold Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Word erase?
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2024 09:29:49 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfqGuzzvxAuKJC+nqrmO3yMptskc0bXeQjL4m939MKTH=A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <202404081518.438FIflK003772@freefriends.org>
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On Mon, Apr 8, 2024, 9:18 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> My memory jibes with this -- through V7 defaults were # and @, and BSD
> changed to ^H / DEL and ^U. ^W was a BSD thing, probably inspired by
> TOPS-10.
>
> There was a patch on USENET that added ^T to print the load average that
> we put into the vax at Georgia Tech. A professor who'd come to us from MIT
> saw it and was surprised tht we could do it on Unix. :-)
>
^T made it into BSD and lives on to this day in the BSDs. If I were catty,
I'd say real unix still can... :) too bad linux never picked it up.
Warner
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-04-08 15:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-04-08 15:02 [TUHS] " Dan Cross
2024-04-08 15:15 ` [TUHS] " Marc Donner
2024-04-08 15:18 ` arnold
2024-04-08 15:29 ` Warner Losh [this message]
2024-04-08 15:59 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2024-04-08 15:39 ` Larry McVoy
2024-04-08 16:06 ` Rich Salz
2024-04-09 1:51 ` Chris Torek
2024-04-12 15:58 ` Mary Ann Horton
2024-04-08 17:09 ` Steve Nickolas
2024-04-08 22:51 ` Mary Ann Horton
2024-04-12 1:29 ` Joseph Holsten
2024-04-08 16:14 ` Clem Cole
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