Re: ISO 2022 and termcap ballast

[Frank da Cruz <fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu>]

Markus said:

> Almost all termcap/terminfo entries are useless today, because these
> terminals do not exist any more. Almost everyone uses vt100, xterm,
> linux, or a very closely related terminal definition...
>
You would be surprised.  We released Kermit 95 just four years ago, with
only VT100/220 and ANSI(*) emulations, and since then -- by popular demand --
we have added more than 30 others: some of them long-forgotten like the
Hazeltines or Volker-Craigs (but the apps hardwired to use them live on);
others still quite current, such as SNI 97801, AT386, SCOANSI, Linux,
various Wyse, etc.  (IBM 3270 and 5250 are also far from dead.)

(*) What most people call "ANSI" emulation refers to IBM's ANSI.SYS
    (described in back pages of the DOS 5.00 manual), used in
    conjunction with Code Page 437, adopted by BBS owners as their
    presentation and i/o method.  "ANSI" has got to be one of the
    most overladen and misused terms in our lexicon(**).

(**) Case in point: the SCO terminfo database has an "ansi" entry 
     corresponding to "SCO ANSI", which is not compatible with "BBS ANSI",
     which most other people call ANSI.  SCO, at least until recently,
     did not recognize "scoansi" as a terminal type.  But practically 
     every emulator uses "ansi" to mean BBS ANSI.  Now consider what
     happens during Telnet terminal-type negotiation...

> If it weren't for our historic collectors mentality, termcap/terminfo
> could very easily be reduced today to somewhere between 1 and 5 entries.
> 
That might well be true, since we all have at our disposal at least a VT100
emulator (VT102, VT220, VT320) or a Linux (or SCO, etc) console.  The same
is not true, however, in the reverse direction, where we have applications
running on these same platforms that do not use terminfo/termcap, but are
hardwired for real physical terminals that are no longer manufactured, and
not widely (or well) emulated.  You can laugh at these applications, but
that won't make them go away.

> Pre ANSI/ISO terminals such as the VT52 or the Hazeltine might still be
> around in the stores of the Cambridge University Computer Preservation
> Society, or in Frank da Cruz's famous archive on the history of video
> terminals...
>
That's Richard Shuford!  He archives the history, we write the emulators :-)

  Terminal history archive:
    http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal_index.html

  The Kermit Project:
    http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/  (Now with Unicode! :-)

- Frank
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