[wellylug] Take a hint

[Enkidu]

On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 21:18:11 +1200, you wrote:

>In message <E1C4xm9-0006cw-00 at israel.diaspora.gen.nz>, michael at diaspora.gen.nz w
>rites:
>>Ewen McNeill writes:
>>>Gosh, another[0] stunningly unfortunate choice on behalf of the GNU
>>>project: ctrl-S (XOFF) 
>>>[0] Using ctrl-H [for help -- typically bound to backspace key now]
>>
>>The bindings in bash aren't known as 'Emacs bindings' for nothing.
>
>Fair enough, although at least Emacs will put the terminal into raw mode
>so the keystrokes stand a chance of working, whereas bash (well,
>readline) tries to use the terminal in an at least semi-cooked mode.  (I
>wasn't aware that you could search-forward again with ctrl-S from a
>reversed search in Emacs, but I don't use Emacs much.)
>
>>I'd also note that C-s and C-h as Emacs bindings likely predate terminals
>>that use XON/XOFF flow control, or C-h as the 'delete and move cursor
>>back one space' key; these sort of Emacs bindings date from the early
>>70s, ISTR.
>
>AFAICT XON/XOFF (DC3 and DC1 in ASCII standard notation) date back to
>around the time that ASCII was being standardised, which was in the
>early to mid 1960s, eg:
>
>http://www.nadcomm.com/ascii_code.htm
>http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/stand.html#ascii1963
>
>and at least some of those references indicate that the same characters
>were chosen because they were being used to control data from paper 
>tape prior to that.
>
>Certainly by the time the VT100 -- 1978 -- was being designed XON/XOFF
>seems to be very standardized:
>
>http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/vt100.html
>
>and other terminals from the same era also used xon/xoff, eg:
>
>http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hp2621.html
>
>I've not been able to find any earlier terminals which explicitly list
>XON/XOFF support; the vt52 -- from 1975 (vt52.html at the same site) --  
>for instance, doesn't report XON/XOFF support.  Possibly it only became
>widely used with terminals capable of 19200 bps or higher (the vt52
>would do only up to 9600bps); from my days of writing terminal programs
>(in 8-bit assembler) you could keep up with 9600bps with 4MHz or slower 
>8-bit hardware, whereas 19200 bps was a real struggle.
>
The Teletypes (eg model 33) certainly used XON/XOFF but that was for
controlling the paper tape reader:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/teletype.html

http://www.vauxelectronics.com/gil/tty/docs/house--teletype-corp-synopsis.htm

ASCII was from around the same era and some even earlier Teletypes
could be converted to ASCII by means of a hardware kit. The ASCII
equivalents to XON/XOFF were DC1 and DC3 I think.

Cheers,

Cliff