gnu (03/25/83)
As a consultant to Anderson-Jacobson I tried to get them to fix their automatic margin mode so that it really truly pretended to be in column 81 after a character was output in column 80. (The next character output would force you to column 1 anyway, but the ancillary effects were wrong, to wit:) Backspace would put you in column 80; cursor addressing or relative motions could take you to column 81; cursor display on status line would show "81", line inserted/deleted by those escape codes would be the correct line (the line where you are in col 81) -- it might have done this right already). They never got around to it; their development schedule was already tight on adding features and never mind fixing the nits. Note that the behaviour I list above is what I consider the "correct" behaviour. Another AJ terminal actually had a column 81, which was used for status flags -- IT implemented this right. But somehow when the hardware cursor can't actually go into that column, people forget about the other effects. Clip this along the dotted line and send it to your favorite broken terminal manufacturer. John Gilmore, Sun Microsystems