[TUHS] Word erase?

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2024, 9:18 AM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the timing and rationale for
> > the introduction of “word erase” functionality to the kernel terminal
> > driver. My surface skim earlier leads me to believe it came to Unix
> > with 4BSD, but it was not reincorporated into 8th Edition or later,
> > nor did it make it to Plan 9 (which did incorporate ^U for the "line
> > kill" command).  TOPS-20 supports it via the familiar ^W, but I'm not
> > sure about other PDP-10 OSes (Lars?).  Multics does not support it.
> > VMS does not support it.
> >
> > What was the proximal inspiration?  The early terminal drivers seem to
> > use the Multics command editing suite (`#` for erase/backspace, `@`
> > for line kill), though at some point that changed, one presumes as
> > TTYs fell out of favor and display terminals came to the fore.
> >
> >         - Dan C.
>
> My memory jibes with this -- through V7 defaults were # and @, and BSD
> changed to ^H / DEL and ^U.  ^W was a BSD thing, probably inspired by
> TOPS-10.
>
> There was a patch on USENET that added ^T to print the load average that
> we put into the vax at Georgia Tech.  A professor who'd come to us from MIT
> saw it and was surprised tht we could do it on Unix. :-)
>

^T made it into BSD and lives on to this day in the BSDs. If I were catty,
I'd say real unix still can... :) too bad linux never picked it up.

Warner

>
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