termcap

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2018, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:
>On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 01:01:53PM -0700, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list thus spoke:
>> Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping?  Too many keystrokes to do
>
>That was back in the days when 8MB actually meant something.  Nowadays, a
>single apache child takes 230MB or so, and there are usually at least five
>or ten running as spares. :)

IIRC, the Radio Shack Xenix system came on about 8 8in floppies,
and ran on a 5MB hard drive.

>Besides, emacs never -really- took eight.
>
>I never had a huge problem with the amount of keystrokes, having previously
>used WordStar.  Remembering some of the more arcane constructs centered
>around the meta commands was a bigger deal, because it's a lot to remember.

WordStar is a great example of software written by people who
didn't have a clue about serial communications.  They used Ctrl-S
for something which didn't work too well on a serial connection.
The Radio Shack Scripsit program did the same thing which didn't
cause many problems until Radio Shack mapped a control key by the
numeric keypad to send it.  I don't know how many customer calls
I got from people saying their terminal wasn't responding.
Ctrl-Q solved their immediate problem.

At least Scripsit was logical, Ctrl-I == Insert, Ctrl-D == Delete, 
and so forth (I guess Ctrl-S == Stop :-).

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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Freedom from prices is freedom from responsibility. You can simply pass
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unspecified costs to be paid by others. -- Thomas Sowell Aug 2000