On Sun, 16 Nov 2014 23:53:50 -0000, wrote:

Life was simpler when everyone was using a VT100 to read USENET.

Simpler? Surely, you jest. I've never used a real vt100/vt102 or
ANSI terminal for anything more than a door stop, but have had to deal
with plenty of emulators. It wasn't easy emulating DEC's moving
target escape sequences, that would change with every model and
revision. Remember vttest?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vttest
Literally everything I tried failed at least one part of the test,
including the original DEC terminals. Then, Unix with TERMCAP and
TERMINFO arrived, at which point I gave up trying to emulate
vt100/vt102 terminals, and moved on to broken ANSI X3.64 attempts with
proprietary "enhancements":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
http://www.markcrocker.com/rexxtipsntricks/rxtt28.2.0777.html
I thought I was finally free of the emulation nightmares, when I was
introduced to X-terminals and xterm, which reset the learning curve
over by adding a display manager, desktop manager, and xterm to the
emulation mess. Can't win. As soon as something finally works, it's
replaced immediately by something that doesn't.

At no time during all these "improvements" did any of the terminal
servers, emulators, or kludges ever properly deal with 2,4,8 character
tab indents. Extra credit to the C programmers who would format their
code in "pretty type", but didn't feel it necessary to put opposing
curly braces in the same column, which would have made tab expansion
easy. Oh yeah... setting tab stops beyond the right wrap margin
usually produced "unexpected results".

At this time, I'm using Forte Agent to read usenet news. Among the
options and settings can be found a myriad of kludges, tricks,
work-around's, and outright butchery that fixes many of the
aforementioned abomination and more, all of which were probably based
on the mistakes found in the original vt100/vt102.

http://i2.wp.com/rundiabetes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/vt100-logo.jpg
That's the Vermont 100 mile ride/run for diabetes.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558