Control W, control-O et al was part of dos-8. It was all parts of the early TOPS-10. Control-T came from Tenex which later became TOPS-20.
If VMS added it that was much later, as it was not in the early editions.
Steve Zimmerman added Control-T and all of Tenex tty features to an early Masscomp RTU. I think Sam Added to a later version of BSD I believe.
My favorite story was that the Stanford folks modified the TOPS-20 “LOTS” system to change what control-T returned depending on the load average. The default would say RUNNING. LOTS reported JOGGING, WAlKING CRAWLING. But the Adminstration made them remove the hack because it most often reported DYING
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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.