[TUHS] Compatibility question

Jon Forrest nobozo at gmail.com
Tue Dec 19 08:29:05 AEST 2023


Speaking of how VMS handled escape sequences, in the 1980s I
swung both ways (e.g. VMS and Unix). When DEC announced TERMTABLE,
a termcap-like library for VMS, I thought it would be fun to
write a termcap to TERMTABLE conversion program, so I did.
I thought this would let me run VMS TUI programs on non-DEC
compatible terminals.

This turned out to be a bad idea because none (?) of the DEC-written
programs actually used TERMTABLE. They were all hard-wired to use
VT100 (and VT52?) escape sequences. As I recall, I couldn't find any
programs that used TERMTABLE in non-trivial ways so I gave up.

Jon Forrest
UCB (ret.)


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