[TUHS] Control-T in UNIX

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

^T was in 4.3Reno and NET/2. Or rather, CSTATUS was, as was the stty status
command. It looks like it wasn't on by default in the BSD distributions. It
wasn't in 4.3BSD or 4.3Tahoe though.

However, having said that, I remember using ^T on the VAX 11/750 we had at
the New Mexico Tech CS department that was running a 4.3BSD with a hacked
kernel (^T from USENET was one of the patches).

Warner

On Fri, May 22, 2026 at 9:06 PM Reese Johnson via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> Wow! Thank you so much. I'm a bit younger but I really love Unix. I am
> located in Georgia too. I use ^T all the time still on FreeBSD. I had no
> idea GT had something to do with it. Nice to meet you all. This list is so
> amazing.
>
> Thanks
> Reese KN4NTU
> 73
>
> On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 01:23:02PM -0600, Arnold Robbins via TUHS wrote:
> > It was indeed posted to USENET, but didn't (IIRC) make it into the
> > official 4.3 BSD release.
> >
> > Scott Lee and I put it in to 4.2 BSD at Georgia Tech, and I think I
> > put it into 4.3BSD + Mt. Xinu at Emory.
> >
> > At GT, I remember a professor who came from MIT being pleasantly
> > surprised to learn that we had ^T on the vax. :-)
> >
> > Rich Salz via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> >
> > > My recollection is that Chris Torek at University of Maryland added
> control
> > > t to the bsd tty driver and it was made available in 4.3 or so. It was
> > > posted to Usenet which is where I read about it
> > >
> > > On Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:02 AM Ron Natalie via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > When Mike Muuss was playing with enhancing the UNIX scheduler in our
> > > > (largely V6 based) kernels, we had access to some of the DEC-10 OS’s
> > > > that did have control-T.
> > > > Mike added that to our kernel (llisting all the processes running on
> the
> > > > terminal) so he could get some feedback on what his tweaks were
> doing.
> > > >
> > > > -Ron
> > > >
> > > >
>