epm0@bunny.UUCP (Erik Mintz) (08/27/85)
*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR BOAT ANCHOR *** In the near future I am going to find myself working on a Data General AP-130 Eclipse system, runing AOS. Has anyone managed to get SED (or anything requiring cursor control) to work with a VT-100 type terminal? I would very much appreciate any pointers on how to make this work. Please respond by mail; I can't imagine that many people are interested in this topic. -- Erik Mintz ARPA or CSnet : epm0%gte-labs.csnet@csnet-relay UUCP: ...harvard!bunny!epm0
epm0@bunny.UUCP (Erik Mintz) (09/05/85)
I found a surprisingly large amount of interest in the idea of using a VT-100 type terminal on a Data General system (AOS). Many thanks to all who replied. Unfortunately, the answers are quite discouraging. Apparently the cursor control codes are wired directly into the editor program (SED), and thus can not be altered. There is a way to tell AOS about your terminal, but this only allows you to terminate commands with a CR instead of New line, and will not help programs that use direct cursor addressing. The best one can do is edit in line mode. I guess I will just have to move a Dasher beside my VT-100. -- Erik Mintz ARPA or CSnet : epm0%gte-labs.csnet@csnet-relay UUCP: ...harvard!bunny!epm0
gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) (09/09/85)
When I worked at DG in '79 or '80 or so, their editors and terminal software was a strange combination of advanced and primitive. It was advanced in that the shell and various other programs used flexible kernel facilities to give you command line editing, including cursor motions and insert/delete (as well as word-erase and lop-one-off-the-end and kill-whole-line). On the other hand, the control characters that would do this were wired in to all the programs and the kernel. DG had only built two or three terminals at the time, so this was no big deal, and part of their strategy when selling you a system was to get you to buy 5 or 10 or 50 of their terminals at the same time. They probably made more on the terminals than on the CPUs! (I remember hearing someone brag that the new Dasher terminal -- in the plastic case, not in the metal U-bracket with tilt and swivel) would cost under $200 to build and would sell for $1800.) Given these economics, their software certainly had to enforce that you wouldn't just buy ADM-3A's with your inexpensive DG cpu. These days you could run DG/UX under AOS, I think, if you want generic terminal support. Or does DG/UX only run on Eagles (MV series)?