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Terminals, ttys, etc. have some of the most arcane and outdated APIs I am aware of. It's like a window back into the 1970s


It's one of the reasons I love them. A ball of insane, esoteric, baffling, confusing cruft, layered in a century long onion, with connections to the very basics of telecommunications. At any moment, both the simplest interface and the most complex, both the beautiful speckled black void of the night sky, and the horrific gaping maw of a Lovecraftian beast.


The window part is 1980s. the window back is deeper than the 70s, because the termcap/terminfo specs go into Teletype ASR33 territory which is 70s implementations of a core technology from the Baudot code era.


I believe terminals in the late 70 already could change their geometries. The VT100 could go from 80 to 132 columns.


Controlled with DECCOLM, mode ?3. Curious how many terminals besides xterm choose to support that one.


Most ‘xterm-compatible’ or ‘vt102-compatible’ terminals do, though at least one handles it wrong.


I have an IBM 3151 (the late model, made by ADDS - pretty much all late-gen terminals are ADDS) that does.

Reminds me I need to bring it here.


The nomenclature "hanging up" a terminal even dates back to pulse-dialling landline phones where the receiver was physically hung up on a hook to activate a switch that opened the circuit and ended the call.




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