19 Dec
2023
19 Dec
'23
4:29 a.m.
Speaking of how VMS handled escape sequences, in the 1980s I
swung both ways (e.g. VMS and Unix). When DEC announced TERMTABLE,
a termcap-like library for VMS, I thought it would be fun to
write a termcap to TERMTABLE conversion program, so I did.
I thought this would let me run VMS TUI programs on non-DEC
compatible terminals.
This turned out to be a bad idea because none (?) of the DEC-written
programs actually used TERMTABLE. They were all hard-wired to use
VT100 (and VT52?) escape sequences. As I recall, I couldn't find any
programs that used TERMTABLE in non-trivial ways so I gave up.
Jon Forrest
UCB (ret.)