[TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 26 Nov 2020, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> To make this a bit more TUHS-focused, was there anything that had 
> similar functionality which pre-dated Bill Joy and termcap in late 70's?

As I recall, one wrote code "knowing" that it was a VT-05 etc if you 
wanted escape sequences; I dimly recall using a getty-like file to get the 
terminal type.  Thus, /dev/tty8 was invariably (but not always) the 
dreaded VT-05 (one client used a Duckwriter as the console, because he 
wanted a hard-copy of everything; one day, the system went berserk (a bad 
sector smack on the error log) and so did the hard copy, as Unix 
faithfully tried to record each error).

-- Dave