OT: Color, the SCO console vs FacetWin

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Apr 04, 2004, Brian K. White wrote:
....
>I understand the original design philosophy behind termcap & terminfo
>specifically to provide a means for the host to support any terminal, and
>SCO's ansi is indeed a needless mutation of the perfectly good "ansi" that
>already existed, but neither of those changes the fact that it's more
>practical for my one pc to emulate all the sco boxes than for all the sco
>boxes to cater to my pc.

SCO's version of ANSI terminals wasn't needless when it first came out in
the late '80s as none of the DEC VTxxx terminals then supported color, nor
was there a single ANSI standard terminal at the time.  IBM PCs running DOS
then didn't support ANSI, and when Windows came along, it wasn't really
native.  Given the number of SCO Xenix and later SCO Unix machines was
probably larger than all other versions of *nix combined, one could make a
strong argument that SCO ansi should have been then standard.

>Also a terminal emulator on a pc isn't a real terminal, it's software, it
>doesn't have any "native" operation of it's own that is any more right than
>any of it's other possible emulations. It's 100% emulation and no matter
>what it does, its' emulating something, so emulating the sco console is no
>different than any other way it could possibly work. Given that, there is no
>validity to the argument that it's better to tell the host how to understand
>the terminal than to tell the terminal how to understand the host.
>Ultimately they are both "just software" in this case and both are mutable,
>so it comes down to which way requires more work which my first paragraph
>addresses.

I wrote a termcap that allowed me to use Kaypro 10s running CP/M as data
terminals on Tandy Xenix systems using a standard terminal program, not a
terminal emulator.  The termcap caused the Xenix box to send back the
native Kaypro cursor control and video attributes so that one had full
screen capabilities.  One can do the same from any *nix system today in an
xterm by running ckermit to connect with no terminal emulation.

FWIW, I stopped using the SCO scoterm program in favor of xterm about ten
years ago so I would have an interface common to every variety of *nix.  I
still use the plain jane XFree86 version of xterm rather than some of the
fancier variants that have appeared over the years (e.g. kvt, konsole,
etc.) because I don't like the extra bells and whistles, and I don't have
compatibility problems.

Bill
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