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0 pointsnurettin7y ago0 comments

I have a different theory; perhaps line printers (which terminals try to emulate) are to blame.

Space on a line is limited and one directional, so thr tools naturally evolved towards strange single line incantations instead of full fledged programs.

Commodore Pet did it right by introducing a navigable terminal where you could move between lines and don't need to open an editor to write multiline programs.

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pmontra7y ago

I don't have time to Google now but I think that mainframe terminals worked like that. 3270 should be the model to search for.

TheOtherHobbes7y ago

This was already a solved problem in the 70s. IBM's 3270 series offered full buffered access to a character matrix display, and DEC's VT52 and later terminals added bi-directional scrolling.

Modern CLIs can usually emulate at least a few of the old scrolling character matrix displays, but only a few bash commands (e.g. top) use the extra features.

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