Post #579137

2026-03-08 00:34 UTC

@kentpitman@climatejustice.social @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca Yeah, I don't know. Maybe '~' was prevalant in Emacs source, or I'm conflating TECO with Something Else. By my era VT-52s were gone, you'd occasionally see a VT100 in a server room for not wanting to waste $$ there, the terminal of choice at Stanford CS was the Heathkit-19 + if you were in one of the well-financed research groups, you got a Sun-1 or a Sun-2. At DEC(WSL) where I interned, it was all personal VAXstations. I do recall Emacs ^S and ^Q being problematic due to terminal mode occasionally getting set badly (and then the underlying hardware would wake up, "Oh, flow control! I know how to do that!", ^S would freeze everything and you had to Just Know to do ^Q...)

Replies (3)

@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net 2026-03-08 01:10

@kentpitman@climatejustice.social @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca > I also recall '~' being an important character ok, I seem to be out-to-lunch on this (or at least, remembering Something Else; but I can't imagine what...): https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/teco/emacs11/emacs11.tec (admittedly, this is VAX/PDP-11 TECO source for Emacs and maybe Fred had to do a complete rewrite of some sort and the actual TOPS20/PDP-10 source is completely different, but I kind of doubt it). It *does* definitely look like line noise, though.

Open ##579617
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz 2026-03-08 00:51

@wrog This seems familiar, but I'm not wholly sure why. It is binary 01111110 and as such really did show up in some line noise contexts that favored such a thing (it's similar to 11111111). It's also used by vi to mark nonexistent lines at the end of the file; Bill wanted it to be something other than just nothing on that screen line, for specificity of feedback to the user. @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot

Open ##1444910
@ewhac@mastodon.social 2026-03-09 01:10

@ramin_hal9001 @kentpitman @screwlisp @wrog @dougmerritt @cdegroot I was using ^S/^Q last night to pause some fast-moving `make` output to check to see if the thing that should have gotten built got built.

Open ##1444911