[TUHS] termcap vs terminfo (was: I swear! I rtfm'ed)

[arnold at skeeve.com]

> Peter Jeremy scripsit:
> > But you pay for the size of $TERMCAP in every process you run.

John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> A single termcap line doesn't cost that much, less than a KB in most cases.

In 1981 terms, this has more weight. On a non-split I/D PDP-11 you only
have 32KB to start with.  (The discussion a few weeks ago about cutting
yacc down to size comes to mind...)

On a Vax with 2 Meg of memory, 512 bytes is a whole page, and it might
even be paged out, and BSD on the vax didn't have copy-on-write.

ISTR that the /etc/termcap file had a comment saying something like
"you should move the entries needed at your site to the top of this file."
Or am I imagining it? :-)

In short - today, sure, no problem - back then, carrying around a large
environment made more of a difference.

Thanks,

Arnold