job control

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

From: campbell%maynard.UUCP at harvisr.harvard.edu (Larry Campbell)
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 86 11:43:38 EDT
Organization: The Boston Software Works, Inc.

In article <5990 at ut-sally.UUCP> guy at sun.com (Guy Harris) writes:

>This sort of windowing mechanism doesn't even necessarily require a
>memory-mapped screen; it merely needs a way to redraw a window when it moves
>to the front.  Mark Horton's earlier message describes a window manager for
>dumb terminals; it even permits more than one window on the screen.

Of course, but I suspect that redrawing windows over a serial line
would be tedious -- unless the serial line were running at 56KB or better.

>As for the window size "ioctl", consider this: any program that thinks it's
>always dealing with a "perfectly ordinary 24x80 terminal" is going to be
>quite surprised when run on an Ann Arbor Ambassador with 60 lines.  Programs
>should not make assumptions like that.

That was an oversimplification on my part.  Of course programs should
(and most do) query termcap/terminfo.  However, they can safely assume
that the window size isn't going to change while they're running, and
this assumption reduces complexity.
-- 
Larry Campbell            MCI: LCAMPBELL   The Boston Software Works, Inc.
ARPA: campbell%maynard.uucp at harvard.ARPA   120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
UUCP: {alliant,wjh12}!maynard!campbell     (617) 367-6846

Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 58