@cks @drscriptt

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.

http://jdebp.info/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/setterm.xml

#nosh #TerminalEmulators

@drscriptt @cks

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.

#DECVTs #TerminalEmulators

@cstross

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