Input Line Editing (Really: X on the KSR-33)

[Barry Shein]

These cries for an X-server for dumb terminals remind me a lot of the
days when people always screamed if some screen-oriented program
didn't have some mode for people on paper terminals, back then most or
many people used paper terminals and CRTs were these rather rare,
expensive beasts. It was considered pretty arrogant to write programs
which only worked on glass ttys (I got in some trouble at Harvard for
doing that once, until I pointed out that we didn't have any paper
ttys in the lab the software was designed for, people were still
uneasy that we "might" someday...?!)

Somehow, it got worked out, and few true screen programs ever really
managed to provide much support for paper (although some editors had a
limited mode for this, EMACS in paper-tty mode was interesting...)

I think the designs will have to assume bit addressable terminals of
reasonable resolution and the market will solve the rest of the
problem (as it already is doing rapidly.)

Like supporting old hardware in general, the day simply comes when you
have to pay a lot of $$$ to have your "cheap" hardware supported,
there's no other way (other than accepting no support), you won't get
creative people terribly interested in writing X servers for KSR-33's,
tho you might be able to pay one enough to think about it, false
economy I suspect, unless you do succeed in convincing someone to
provide a few tens of thousands of dollars of programming for free by
screaming loud enough.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

The future just isn't what it used to be...