Why magic cookies? (was: Alternate character modes...)

[Sean Eric Fagan]

In article <1991Mar09.215153.27776 at eecs.wsu.edu> rnelson at yoda.UUCP (Roger Nelson) writes:
>1. Why did terminal manufactures go with magic cookies?  The magic cookies
>   make display attributes useless.

Because memory was expensive, and saving memory by making the attributes
take up a screen position helped the situation.  (They got one byte per
character on the screen; the most common method, nowadays, is to have each
character on the screen take up two bytes:  one for the character, one for
the display attributes.)

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