[TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards

[Bakul Shah]

RFC734

> On Nov 26, 2020, at 10:38 AM, jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>> From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o"
> 
>> was there anything that had similar functionality which pre-dated Bill
>> Joy and termcap in late 70's?
> 
> Is your question purely in Unix, or more general?
> 
> If the latter, there's the terminal-independent support of video terminals in
> ITS; that dates to the mid-1970's (i.e. circa V5 or so). User programs output
> device-independent display control codes (I have this memory that they were
> called P-Codes, but that could be my memory failing), and the OS translated
> them to the appropriate screen-control characters.
> 
> One additional hack was that the number of terminal types supported in the OS
> was limited; there was however a protocol called SUPDUP which sent (basically)
> those device-independent codes over a remote login (originally over NCP) frm
> the server machine to the client. The User SUPDUP client supported a lot more
> terminal types; so people with odd-ball terminals used to log in, SUPDUP
> _back_ to their machine, and away they went.
> 
>     Noel