List discussions today have commented on the default of Ctl-E (ASCII 005) as the SIMH escape character, to return from a guest O/S to SIMH itself.
That character is commonly used in the emacs editor family, and in Unix and TOPS-20 shells, usually to move to end of line. I was long ago sufficiently unhappy with the SIMH choice, that I patched local code before building it with a change like this one: % diff $S/simh/gnu-linux-ia32/simhv36-0/sim_console.c sim_console.c 92c92 < int32 sim_int_char = 005; /* interrupt character */ --- > int32 sim_int_char = 036; /* interrupt > character */ [From a 2006-vintage diff in my records]. I don't recall whether, at the time, there was any facility for redefining it in the SIMH startup scripts, avoiding the need to make a trivial tweak to the SIMH source code. My 036 choice corresponds to Ctl-^ (caret), a character unused by either command shells, or the emacs family (although the latter can, of course, be easily configured or programmed to do so, because their input model is that EVERY character runs a command, even if most just insert themselves in the buffer). The ssh and Kermit intercomputer communications systems both use two-character escape sequences, because that is an even better choice: such escapes are rare events, and having to type an extra character is of neglible human overhead. Otherwise, keyboard input to the remote system works much as expected, and all keyboard characters can be input without interference. Those of us who run virtual machines on emulation software where the console is implemented in a Web browser window are continually impacted by some characters being grabbed by the browser before the VM console can even see them. We had similar problems in Denmark, where THREE essential vowels (Danish has nine such) are missing from the US-layout keyboards that we then had. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 be...@acm.org be...@computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh