TOPS-20

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Mon Oct 19 17:46:36 1998

John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com> wrote:
> Sounds like Unix 'fg' and 'bg', unless I'm missing something...

Not good enough. You can 'bg' a job, but you can't log out, log in somewhere
else, and 'fg' the job there.

Screen takes care of this. It also takes care of the fact that you might
have a VT100 in one place and an ADM3 in the other; it presents a uniform
virtual terminal to the applications, and maps it to your actual terminal.

And, you don't have to explicitly detach. Screen will catch SIGHUP and
detach your session. Great for flaky internet connections.

And, if you forget to detach your session when you leave work, and only
discover this when you get home, you can remotely detach and reattach it.

> With the hordes under Unix these days, could it ever be possible
> that someone hasn't implemented, re-implemented and hacked almost
> every feature that's already existed in a previous OS?

Yup! Most of the better features of Multics, Tenex, TOPS-10, TOPS-20,
and other OSes have been added to Unix. One could argue that the
TOPS-20 command line parsing features that everyone seemed to like so
much must not actually be too valuable, since no one has bothered to
reimplement them (except Cisco).

Eric
Received on Mon Oct 19 1998 - 17:46:36 BST