By the way: It's DEC Private Mode 67 (a.k.a. DECBKM) for controlling Backspace, and DEC Private Mode 1037 for Delete.
Not every terminal emulator understands these. But they're understood by things as wide ranging as hterm and mintty.
I copied these from #DECVTs and XTerm in my terminal emulator, and my #setterm has options for generating both DECSM/DECRM mode switches.
The terminal line discipline has very little to do with it, as full-screen programs like VIM put the line discipline into non-canonical mode, where there are no special characters.
Where this issue lies, and has done since the 1980s, is emulating a DEC VT.
On an actual DEC VT the Backspace key is programmatically switchable between DEL and BS. #XTerm extended this years ago and makes the two Delete keys switchable between DEL and DECFNK 3.
The article to which that picture and the related one on the front cover (the same woman seemingly impressing Toyah Wilcox, looking over her shoulder, by using a monitor in portrait orientation as a tanning bed to turn her chest bright orange) belongs has some wild but not *entirely* off predictions.
IBM will win the standards war, with Token Ring and two things that fell by the wayside so thoroughly that I've never encountered them even on OS/2 or PC-DOS.
UIs will employ dynamic function keys, have context-sensitive help, be voice-driven, and will 'eliminate the need for a mouse to always be present to use the system'. (Hey, Cortana! Did that come true?)
MS-DOS will be rewritten in C and become capable of running #Unix programs alongside MS-DOS ones.
And everyone will need a VT-100 (sic!) terminal emulator on their PCs.
#UnixWorld #DECVTs #TerminalEmulators #ComputingHistory #retrocomputing #xterm
It is even more amusing when you spot the old MS-DOS TSR program named GOLD.COM being redacted in the same document. We aren't supposed to know what GOLD22.ZIP contains, apparently.
Not without finding an old Simtel CD, at any rate. (-:
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/10857/simtel_1193.iso/msdos/keyboard/files.bbs
There's supposed to be a legal explanation published for every redaction. What do you think it is going to be for blacking out the name of an MS-DOS TSR utility program?
#MSDOS #EpsteinFiles #SimtelCD #emacs #MSKermit #GoldKey #DECVTs
@fistfulofdave @hippiegunnut @WiteWulf
The interesting question, from that video, is how on Earth the Script tool on the #Synclavier 2 managed to get a #VT100 to display musical notes on a set of staves. Actual VT100s didn't have Sixel or ReGIS.
My educated guess is either a custom character set in ROM, or (more likely) that's actually a VT240 or a VT105/VT125 (or a VT100 hardware upgraded to the same).
JdeBP
JdeBP