Nerding out with termcap

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Tom Jennings wrote:

> aka: nostalgia right under our noses
>
> This is one of those admissions like enjoying listening to Barry
> Manilow or something...

I'll never admit to that (even if it is true).

> So I'm making a computer for my car (freeBSD on a mini-ITX box)
> and I'm hacking a "terminal" in an old AM radio chassis (a PIC,
> two rotary encoders (VOLUME and TUNE), two momentary switches on
> the shafts and a 4x20 LCD) to run a Perl script that drives
> mpg321.

Sweet!  Sounds like a good project for Make magazine.

> The comments in termcap are hilarious. There's a lot of obsolete
> knowledge and funny comments in there, from when the unix world
> was a lot smaller.

I read through it before and it is indeed entertaining, and yes,
everything is preserved in Linux.  It's interesting to note that Unix is
so backward compatible that it will still work with old hardware, thanks
to anachronisms like the TERMCAP file.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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