below ..

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt@update.uu.se> wrote:

Case do matter.

I thought so, but it's been years since I played with any of this.

Shorter form: "\033[H\033[J"

right - that looks much more what I remember.

2.) VT-100's did not implement the full ANSI spec like Ann Arbor, Heathkit,
Wyse etc. So there are a number of things that those terminals did
better. A really good reason to you curses(3) because all the knowledge is
keep in the termcap and as a programmer you don't need to worry about it.

Probably true. However, I'm not sure Ann Arbor or Heathkit did much better.

They did - but they had the advantage of complete spec, which when then VT-100 team did their thing, was working with a proposal.

As far as I can remember, they were always more "weird"

I guess. Maybe the were not too go at running programs like EDT on VMS. which used the DEC private sequences. As I recall you grew up on RSX and VMS so would not have had the same affinity that we in the UNIX side did.

VMS folks tended to stay with something that looked a lot like VT-100, whereas UNIX folks often chose more functionality in the terminal.

Personally, I'd give an AAA or a Heathkit away if one was dropped on me. A VT100 I would keep. :-)

To each each his own. I still have an H19 and a Wyse-60. Would love to find an old AAA, but I personally would not bother with any member of VT-100 family since most SW emulators are "good enough" for my use when I might want VT-100 specifics.

I heard that some folks in the VMS world gripe about the emulators not being good enough, but my use has never been that much and certainly there are lots of other issues with the newer VT-xxx's that drove me bonkers.

I've sometimes toyed with the thought of taking one of the Mac Terminal emulators and hacking it in AAA features, but it's never been high on my list. I have always had too many other worthy projects in front of it. Truth is the programmable keyboard macros of the Tek 4025 and AAA are what I miss in modern systems more than anything else.

Then again, if I had one, I'd probably hate the keyboard layout these days. Once the ANSI/ECMA keyboard layout came out, I forced myself to key used to it and actually now prefer it. But that took years to reprogram the ROMS in my fingers. ;-)

Clem