Anton Aylward wrote:
Per Jessen said the following on 02/28/2013 03:15 PM:
There is also the little matter of two completely different environments - a IBM 3270 terminal vs the DEC VT100 (essentially). The former is screen based, the latter is line based.
Eh? The KSR-33 was line based but not the VY-100. As far back as 1982 I was using VI on VT100 and clones (made by Wyse or someone) in full screen mode. That's what TERMCAP was for. Thank you Bill Joy.
Not the interface, the technology. Everything you send to a VT-100 is line base, one long string, optionally with ANSI control characters. A 3270 is more like a directly addressable full screen. Well, I guess whatever comes down the line is a string too, but that's what a 3270 looks like to a programmer.
One funny thing is - the standard IBM line length is 80 chars, which goes all the way back to punchcards. I have not worked with punchcards myself, but IBM JCL is nothing but "screen" punchcards. However, think about how often we limit ourselves to 80 chars - in email, in code, everywhere. If it wasn't for punchcards, we wouldn't have a continuation character.
Yes, but there's a lot about UNIX and the 'Net which doesn't acknowledge line length.
Definitely.
Again, as far bask as the 1980s protocols such as NEWS/NNTP the concatenation of the sites the message had passed though produced lines that were of indefinite length,
Hmm, don't they follow email standards? I'm sure USENET is where we first saw base64 encoding folded into neat lines of 76 bytes. Even the linux kernel likes the 80 character limit: "The limit on the length of lines is 80 columns and this is a strongly preferred limit."
Anyway, we're way OT. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.7°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - free DNS hosting, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org