🚀 go-pugleaf

All this talk about brain-damaged terminals has got me thinking about
why I hate most terminals.  Right now I'm using a Wyse 60.  It has
quite a bit of intelligence, including programmable character sets
(fun, but almost useless), lots of emulations (useless to me on a Unix
system), lots of strange block-transmit modes (useless), PC-AT keyboard
emulation (bizarre, and useless), sixteen special function keys (not
entirely useless; at least they're programmable), numeric keypad
(useless), built-in calculator (a particularly stupid calculator),
calendar, alarm clock, and ASCII chart (the stupidest ASCII chart I
have ever seen).  On and on and on.  The keyboard is cluttered with
things like "Print", "Send", "Prev/Next PAGE", "Funct" (really great:
transmits ^A<key>^M, just what I needed).  The intelligence has some
problems, but I can forgive them.

I'm a programmer.  Certainly there are lots of people out there who are
programmers as well.  All of these people (for the sake of argument,
allow me this) use terminals, and probably most of them don't use the
AUX port in bidirectional mode, and don't ever press the SEND PAGE
button except by accident, and get really upset when they hit the PRINT
SCREEN button and have to wait for the terminal to make believe it's
printing the screen (a VT100 emulator I used had this feature; the
PRINT SCREEN key was conveniently located right next to the arrow
keys).  Are there any terminals designed such that features useless on
my UNIX system (or RSTS, VMS, or whatever) can be left out entirely?
Like block mode? or keyboard lock (what a good idea; lock the keyboard
when a ^O is received...)? or...wait...the man who gives me the
injections is back...I have to go now...no! I don't want the
jacket!...




I get so upset when I think about terminals.

-- 
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Mike McNally                                    Digital Lynx Inc.
Software (not hardware) Person                  Dallas  TX  75243
uucp: ...convex!ctvax!bobkat!m5                 (214) 238-7474