Frank da Cruz said...
> While most Unicoders like to think that terminal emulation is is a relic
> of the past, there are numerous terminal emulators on the market and in
> active development, and millions of people who use them for applications
> ranging from software development, to email, to transaction processing, to
> system administration.
Of course this is true. However... How many of those emulators and people
really require these particular few DEC VT100 graphic codes? Will their
usage increase over time?
I think that if Digital originally didn't bother with them, they're better
left alone.
> Each maker of terminal emulation products does the same thing, but does it
> differently, and this is a rather shameful and unnecessary waste of time and
> labor, and one that inhibits interoperability of applications.
Then they should band together and get themselves organized so they can
request the addition of their required graphical segments and line-drawing
stuff. I don't believe there's that much interest.
> Terminal emulation will be with us for years -- probably decades -- to come.
Of course that's true. It'll just get less like "dumb terminal" emulation.
I don't see a big, continuing market in the 24x80 one-column-one-char
terminal emulator. However, I do see a great long-term need for the
command-line interface and interpretive languages, such as shells, LISP, etc.
Those just don't require the line-drawing legacy stuff. I use a terminal
emulator all the time, daily -- I almost never need even a rudimentary cursor
positioning interface, and *NEVER* need a line drawing interface to it.
Rick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:42 EDT