Type-ahead in unix

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <15845 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
> The history of such features has shown that it
> is hard to get them to ALL work together correctly.

You should try Ultrix 4.1. Sure, DEC made some big mistakes in that OS
(like the way you can spawn /bin/login and trash the host field in your
utmp entry, even the user field if you know what you're doing), and some
of the standard applications do dumb things like leaving your tty in
POSIX mode, but the kernel tty user interface works amazingly well. The
part I'm most impressed by is the way that characters are preserved when
you switch from cbreak to cooked mode: I simply can't tell when the
switch happened, because any typeahead is echoed properly and stuck back
into the cooked cbuf so that line editing works. It's years ahead of the
latest releases from Convex and Sun, not to mention 4.3-Reno.

---Dan