Terminal paging in the kernel

[Lepreau at UTAH-20.ARPA]

From:  Jay Lepreau <Lepreau at UTAH-20.ARPA>

Good grief, what some of you are beating is known, not as a "dead horse,"
but as a "strawman."  Nobody who has advocated page mode EVER said that the
kernel has to know terminal characteristics to do paging; a nay-sayer
asserted it.  Remember the tty CR delay bits that have been in the kernel
forever?  How did it find those out?  stty, that's how, from your
.profile.  And how does it find out cols and rows to do paging and folding?
stty or tset from the same place.  The data happen to be readily available,
you know, nicely encoded in a database so that even user code needn't be
adapted to hardware changes-- it's called termcap.

It's not as if Unix has to boot off your tty.
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