@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

@pitrh

Exotic Silicon is making the mistake that we all have made, of getting ITU T.416 wrong.

I hope that no-one merges that code, because it would be baking erroneous control sequences into #OpenBSD.

Most of the rest of we terminal emulator authors have been though the process, and by now have switched to the correct control sequence that T.416 actually specifies.

It requires colons for sub-parameters, and there is a colour space sub-parameter.

#ExoticSilicon #TerminalEmulators #T416

Why DEC modifiers less 1? Because adding 1 was a bodge for the days when missing parameters defaulted to 1. Default to 0 has been in ECMA-48 since the 1990s.

Why keyboard⇒DEC-like? Because the keyboard page is where the old non-DEC terminal keys like ExSel, Oper and Again live, and this can easily encompass those in sort-of-DEC-VT manner.

Why consumer⇒SCO-like? Because SCO's extensions tend to deal in PC-like stuff that isn't like old terminals, like AL/AC keys.

#TerminalEmulators #ECMA48