> The
> blank line days back to the first days of packet radio when people used
> dumb terminals with blinking cursors.
Actually I think the original reason for not having any prompt (or welcome
text for that matter) in TheNet and BPQ nodes was and is the ambiguity of
the AX.25 protocol. The "node" station couldn't by any means detect
whether the connecting station was a user or another node setting up an
interlink connection. So it is safer to stay silent and wait for the user
to type something first.
In NOS and in Linux this is now solved with different SSID's and LinuxNode
already has a welcome text so this is no reason for not having a prompt.
> On the dumb terminals the text
> always started at the bottom of the screen and scrolled up. A blank line
> was a simple and elegant solution for the hardware available at the time.
> Now days people use computers that display a window and the text starts
> from the TOP OF A BLANK SCREEN and moves down. Any blank lines that are
> printed get lost in all the other blank lines on the screen. There are no
> blinking cursors to make it obvious that a blank line was printed. No one
> ever connects to enough nodes to fill up the screen and make it scroll
> up.
No (blinking) cursor?! Wow, someone here made the comparison to a unix
shell not having a prompt. Well, working without a cursor - now that's
what pain really is!
Anyway as I said in another email, I've come up a solution that I hope
makes everybody happy.
-- ---Tomi Manninen / jlx@rele.tunk.net / OH2BNS @ OH2RBI.FIN.EU---