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

[Warner Losh]

> On Jan 6, 2015, at 5:22 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
>> 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? :-)

No, you aren’t. And iirc, we moved the HP terminal entries to the
top of ours since we got a VAX 11/750, but a bunch of HP terminals
instead of DEC ones for reasons that likely involved graft and fraud
in the procurement office :)

Warner

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