[TUHS] Command Line Editing in the Terminal Driver

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 10 January 2023 at 18:51:07 -0800, Chris Hanson wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2023, at 12:33 PM, Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
>> The Stanford AI lab PDP-10 operating system had line editing built in,
>> and the E editor integrated with this.
>
> Some operating systems like HP's MPE (and probably also Tandem
> GUARDIAN) just expected the use of block-mode terminals for purposes
> of I/O efficiency since interactive use was typically via
> forms-based applications, and got line editing somewhat as a
> side-effect.

Guardian was interesting.  The normal connection (from my point of
view, anyway) was via a TATM (Tandem Asynchronous Terminal
Multiplexer), which buffered the characters, but it didn't interrupt
the processor until one of 4 configurable characters were entered
(typically CR, abort, end of input).  This didn't offer line editing,
and the workarounds were painful.

There was also a block mode, mainly for end user applications, though
the “full screen” editor also used it.

Greg
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