[Info-vax] VMS Features I Wish Linux Had

[osuvman50 at gmail.com]

On Friday, June 10, 2016 at 9:17:30 AM UTC-4, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> On 6/9/2016 10:37 PM, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > The other one is the terminal driver. My first impression of Unix
> > was  what a crap terminal driver it had, that echoes everything as
>  > soon as it’s typed. Seems like no other system has seen fit to
>  > emulate the thoughtful VMS feature of not echoing anything until
>  > it is actually being recognized as input to a program.
> 
> Which can let text not intended to be echoed like passwords leak to the 
> terminal output.
> 
>  > And of course note the versatility of IO$_READPROMPT--you could do
>  > all your terminal I/O with just this one call!
> 
> The terminal driver design and much of the VMS I/O design makes it easy 
> to offload I/O processing to additional systems.
> 
> Which means that the IO$_READPROMPT processing could in theory be 
> entirely handled by a terminal server or local CPU on the serial interface.

There was a company called Zyplex, started by ex-DEC employees, that made terminal servers that did just that.  I heard they were in the same group developing LAT and thought there approach was better than LAT's port-level approach.  For the slow VAXes of the 1980s, Xyplex was a good fit, but I think LAT scaled better in the end.