13 Mar
2023
13 Mar
'23
6:04 p.m.
Hi,
Ron wrote:
The AIX for the PS/2 had a thing called the HFT which
allowed you to
switch the VGA head between different virtual screens long before
LINUX came along.
AIX 3.2.5 on the POWER RS/6000 still had the HFT, High Function
Terminal. /dev/hft0 IIRC. It had a framebuffer which was extremely
slow when used as a TTY; one could follow the old text rippling up the
screen to make way for the new line at the bottom. Interrupting a
cat(1) didn't cut the wait for the HFT to catch up with what cat had
already written; seconds passed.
Given ‘startx’ was the main command entered this was only a pain when
debugging something outside of X Windows.
--
Cheers, Ralph.