Of old shells and pipe symbols

[Bill Carpenter]

In article <10083 at tekecs.TEK.COM>, andrew at frip (Andrew Klossner) writes:
>accepted both '^' and '|'.  In the early 1970s, terminals on which it
>was easy to key '|' were not widespread.  The classic terminal, the
>TTY33, had no way to key '|', '{', '}', '~', or '`'.  (Or lower case
>letters, for that matter.)

Remnants  of  which you  can  see (and  might have  otherwise wondered
about) in the termio(7) man page (at least on my  system).  If you set
both XCASE and ICANON, it seems to be related to this gobbledygook.

There is also a companion piece about "half ASCII mode" (how cute!) in
some versions of the lp(7) man page.

I'm pretty glad that most of the time all I have to worry about now is
the occasional EBCDIC incursion.  (Like, I  don't have to  worry about
the difference between Univac 6-bit field data  code, CDC  6-bit field
data code,  DoD 6-bit field  data code, ITA No.  5, baudot code, and a
host of other stuff.

Maybe somebody should suggest making ASCII a standard? :-)

-- Bill Carpenter         att!ho5cad!wjc  or  attmail!bill