Re: [TUHS] I swear! I rtfm'ed

The move was from termcap to terminfo. Termlib was the library for termcap. There were two problems with termcap. One was that the two-character name space was running out of room, and the codes were becoming less and less mnemonic. But the big motivator was performance. Reading in a termcap entry from /etc/termcap was terribly slow. First you had to scan all the way through the (ever-growing) termcap file to find the correct entry. Once you had it, every tgetstr (etc) had to scan from the beginning of the entry, so starting up a program like vi involved quadratic performance (time grew as the square of the length of the termcap entry.) The VAX 11/780 was a 1 MIPS processor (about the same as a 1 MHz Pentium) and was shared among dozens of timesharing users, and some of the other machines of the day (750 and 730 Vaxen, PDP-11, etc.) were even slower. It took forever to start up vi or more or any of the termcap-based programs people were using a lot. I wrote a paper about it for Usenix in 1982, but it seems to be lost to Google. Here is a nice write-up Pavel Curtis posted about it with more detail about the motivation: http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix-source-code/research/1982/0711.html Mary Ann On 01/01/2015 07:03 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote: