[HECnet] Vt100 tester

[Clem Cole]

Keith was one of the original xterm authors and part of the original Project Athena at MIT & DEC.    Sadly, what I recall seems to be correct for an open source version of SIXEL.



From: Keith Packard  
Date: Monday, March 4, 2013 4:55 PM
To: Clement Cole  
Subject: Re: Pulling Old Bits from the memory cache


"Cole, Clement T"   writes:

Hey Keith,
        One of the computer history mailing lists I monitor popped up a
        question you might know the answer too.     Going back to your Athena
        days, do you know if anyone ever either open sourced DECterm,
        and/or put SIXEL/Regis support into something like xterm?     To my
        knowledge,    xterm never did SIXEL (it did support Tek 4010 / plot
        10).

I've never seen the sources of DECterm, but fwiw, the VT100 emulator in
xterm came from the DEC team who did the 'real' VT100 and, as I recall,
came from a validated VT100 simulator, making it the best VT100
emulation of its era.

xterm certainly never did sixel or regis support before leaving the X
consortium and Thomas Dickey never added it to my knowledge. Knowing a
bit about the internals of xterm, adding sixel support would be a fairly
major restructuring of the code.

-keith