Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The TTY demystified (2008)

linusakesson.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 33 posts

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#21

Post by thinkpad20 »

random778 wrote: post #16
leaveyou wrote: post #5

I have read this with interest but the obsessive compulsive developer inside me keeps bothering me with questions like "isn't it worrying/depressing that today's best OS & applications are stuck with interfaces modeled with messy, leaky or no abstraction at all after devices used more than 100 years ago with no opportunity for radical improvement in sight ?". Sometimes I have the feeling that in software we are build…

"1,000,000 times the performance and there's still an ASR-33 in the middle ..." [ http://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDEADYET.pdf ] There are people (Alan Kay et al.) apparently born with Nada's glasses, but industry as a whole doesn't believe them.

What does Nada's glasses refer to? I'm unaware of this expression and searching did not elucidate.

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#22

Post by cathexis »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #21
random778 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"1,000,000 times the performance and there's still an ASR-33 in the middle ..." [ http://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDEADYET.pdf ] There are people (Alan Kay et al.) apparently born with Nada's glasses, but industry as a whole doesn't believe them.

What does Nada's glasses refer to? I'm unaware of this expression and searching did not elucidate.

They Live: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#23

Post by jefurii »

leaveyou wrote: post #5

I have read this with interest but the obsessive compulsive developer inside me keeps bothering me with questions like "isn't it worrying/depressing that today's best OS & applications are stuck with interfaces modeled with messy, leaky or no abstraction at all after devices used more than 100 years ago with no opportunity for radical improvement in sight ?". Sometimes I have the feeling that in software we are build…

Do you worry that all kinds of devices around you are using old technology like wires, resistors, diodes, and other such?

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#24

Post by panic »

angdis wrote: post #7
leaveyou wrote: post #5

I have read this with interest but the obsessive compulsive developer inside me keeps bothering me with questions like "isn't it worrying/depressing that today's best OS & applications are stuck with interfaces modeled with messy, leaky or no abstraction at all after devices used more than 100 years ago with no opportunity for radical improvement in sight ?". Sometimes I have the feeling that in software we are build…

OK, but you have to admit it does the job and few (none?) people complain about the limitations of VT100 terminal emulation. If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like? Would it be better in terms of functionality, multi-platform capability? What would be the advantage?

If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like?

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world complains about the limitations of VT100 and has some ideas for (GUI) terminal improvement.

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#25

Post by leaveyou »

jefurii wrote: post #23
leaveyou wrote: post #5

I have read this with interest but the obsessive compulsive developer inside me keeps bothering me with questions like "isn't it worrying/depressing that today's best OS & applications are stuck with interfaces modeled with messy, leaky or no abstraction at all after devices used more than 100 years ago with no opportunity for radical improvement in sight ?". Sometimes I have the feeling that in software we are build…

Do you worry that all kinds of devices around you are using old technology like wires, resistors, diodes, and other such?

I would be quite affected if I opened my desktop and noticed some bulky components using vacuum tubes mixed in only for compatibility with some historic peripheral my grandpa used in his twenties.

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#26

Post by yuubi »

peteri wrote: post #17
philh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may not be a good solution currently, but I don't believe that no good solution is possible even in theory. Which makes me wonder if the VT100 paradigm is holding us back. Like, if a VT100 understood the concept of tabs natively, it seems like this wouldn't be a problem. Screen could just map its windows onto VT100 tabs, and the terminal would know what to do with that. I don't know if adding tabs to VT100 emul…

Eh. A real VT100 should understand tabs, you can set them with 'Esc H' oddly the DEC manuals don't say what the effect of resetting tabs would be (I'd guess it defaults to multiples of 8 characters).

Not \x08 tabs, but tabs like recent firefox and chrome use (as if you had several terminal windows with separate ptys and screen contents, but all in one window-manager window).

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#27

Post by jefurii »

leaveyou wrote: post #25
jefurii wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you worry that all kinds of devices around you are using old technology like wires, resistors, diodes, and other such?

I would be quite affected if I opened my desktop and noticed some bulky components using vacuum tubes mixed in only for compatibility with some historic peripheral my grandpa used in his twenties.

Ha! Yeah I guess you would.

When I wrote my comment I was reacting to what I thought your point was: that the console itself might be obsolete and that we should just use binary protocols or some such. Now that I've read some more comments and watched the Destroy All Software video linked to in another comment I think I understand your point better.

In my day job I write software for archival preservation of digitized cultural materials, so I tend to think in terms of preserving access for generations. In this context the continuance of the whole UNIX model makes my job easier. I really really want for computers in the coming decades to be able to interact with, or at least emulate, my software and data.

I can see the limitations and of the TTY as implemented. I still think we need to preserve textual middle layer(s) and UIs, both for historical reasons and because those layers are very useful. I'm guessing we probably both agree about that.

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#28

Post by Animats »

The classic MacOS (not the UNIX-based one) has no terminal abstraction. The basic mechanism of the system is a GUI. That was a good move. (Not having a CPU dispatcher was a bad move; the underlying MacOS is very DOS-like.)

Then there's X-Windows, which was explicitly designed as a terminal system. There were special-purpose X-terminals once.

In the phone space, things are less terminal-like. Although, amusingly, the interface to the phone modem usually accepts the Hayes AT command set.

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#29

Post by jimmaswell »

leaveyou wrote: post #5

I have read this with interest but the obsessive compulsive developer inside me keeps bothering me with questions like "isn't it worrying/depressing that today's best OS & applications are stuck with interfaces modeled with messy, leaky or no abstraction at all after devices used more than 100 years ago with no opportunity for radical improvement in sight ?". Sometimes I have the feeling that in software we are build…

An interface being used for over 100 years is hardly an argument that it's a bad interface. The opposite, really. Can you give more of a concrete reason or example why something is wrong with TTY other than "messy/leaky abstraction"?

Re: The TTY demystified (2008)

#30

Post by na85 »

angdis wrote: post #7
leaveyou wrote: post #5

I have read this with interest but the obsessive compulsive developer inside me keeps bothering me with questions like "isn't it worrying/depressing that today's best OS & applications are stuck with interfaces modeled with messy, leaky or no abstraction at all after devices used more than 100 years ago with no opportunity for radical improvement in sight ?". Sometimes I have the feeling that in software we are build…

OK, but you have to admit it does the job and few (none?) people complain about the limitations of VT100 terminal emulation. If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like? Would it be better in terms of functionality, multi-platform capability? What would be the advantage?

>If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like?

It'd be a monstrosity written in javascript with merely adequate performance on an i7 and no backwards compatibility.

Post reply on HN