Using Termcap – part 1

Before stand-alone computers became common, most computer time was spent in front of a dumb terminal — basically a keyboard and screen that would send whatever the user typed to a big computer somewhere, and display whatever it received back from the big computer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, my first interaction with a computer in the 1970s was via a printing terminal at my elementary school. The next time I used a computer, it was a TRS-80 at Radio Shack. I kind of missed the whole dumb terminal phase of computing, but I certainly spent endless time with my home computer acting as a dumb terminal as it dialed in across the phone lines to other computers running BBSes (bulletin board software).

In a way, this concept lives on via the Internet and cloud computing. Our computers are just far smarter “dumb terminals” when they display all the content generated from Facebook’s servers, or display virtual shopping catalogs that are indexed at Amazon.

I guess there really isn’t anything new.

While today, a modern smart “dumb terminal” may be running JavaScript or (can you believe it?) Flash, decades ago dumb terminals were doing similar rendering – though limited to simple things like moving a cursor around the screen, or turning on underlined text. Or blinking. Anyone remember when things blinked?

Frighteningly enough, you probably still see examples of this at some modern businesses. My car dealer still uses some text-based program in its service department, and it is not that uncommon to see the same in banks or other businesses.

Dedicated terminals were still alive and well in the mid-1990s when I took my first dream job and was teaching week-long OS-9 courses around America (and sometimes in Canada). I would arrive on Sunday night, and at the hotel would be a bunch of boxes that had been delivered. We would rent dumb terminals from local suppliers, and I would unbox and set up eight of them and wire them all up via RS232 serial cables up to the multi-user OS-9 computer I brought with me.

I would then go through the task of configuring the settings on each terminal (they were pretty smart for dumb terminals) to make sure all the settings matched what we would need for the class (like baud rate and serial port settings, as well as emulation mode).

Just like today, there were competing standards back then. A VT100 terminal might expect a particular series of bytes to indicate “clear the screen”, but a DEC terminal might use a different set. What a mess this must have been in the early years!

Fortunately, smart people came up with smart solutions to deal with all these different standards. One such solution was called Termcap – which stood for terminal capabilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termcap

Created in 1978, termcap was a database of various terminal types with entries describing how each one did things like move the cursor or clear the screen. Programs could be written to use the termcap library and then, on startup, they would load the proper codes to match whatever terminal type the user was using — provided it was in the database.

This must have been a major breakthru for writing portable apps, much like Java was a breakthru to let the same app run on Mac, Unix and Windows… Today, HTML5 and JavaScript allow web content to run on desktops, tablets or phones.

I guess there really isn’t anything new.

During my OS-9 days, termcap was important since almost all connections were done via a terminal (or terminal/telnet program). Most industrial OS-9 machines did not have video screens. I found this surprising, since I had come from the hobbyist OS-9 world where all our systems (Radio Shack Color Computer, Delmar, Tomcat, MM/1, etc.) all had graphics and user interfaces. But in the embedded/industrial space, they were just a box of realtime computing, and if the user did need to interact with it, they hooked up a terminal.

But I digress.

Recently, I began working on a new ticket barcode project that would ultimately run on small Raspberry Pi computers. I was doing all the prototyping work on Windows, and also compiling the same for Mac. Since I do not know anything about writing GUI programs, let alone how I would write something that would work on Windows, Mac and ultimately Linux, I was writing everything as an old style text-mode program.

This was more than enough to test all the functions, even if ultimately we would be using small 7″ color displays at each system. (I sense that I will be writing some articles on Raspberry Pi video in the future.)

Because I am now at the stage where I want to do more than just scroll text, I decided to revisit the old Termcap system and see if I could at least write fancy text programs that could use color, and create fancier text screens, and actually work on all my development platforms. I actually looked in to termcap few months ago when I wanted to do something similar on Arduinos, but at the time I decided it was impossible due to limited memory. (Update: That may not actually be the case.)

My goals of the next few articles will be:

  1. Explain how termcap works.
  2. Explain how to get termcap running on a Windows system (as well as Mac, and Raspberry Pi).
  3. Create a simple library of common screen features (actually based on code I wrote in late 1995, to convert my EthaWin OS-9 user interface to run on the OS-9 machines at work via termcap).

…and after all this, I think I will have a version that works on Arduino as well.

More to come…

2 thoughts on “Using Termcap – part 1

  1. Pingback: Using Termcap – part 2 | Sub-Etha Software

  2. Pingback: Using Termcap – part 3 | Sub-Etha Software

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