I have read this with interest but the obsessive compulsive developer inside me keeps bothering me with questions like "isn't it worrying/depressing that today's best OS & applications are stuck with interfaces modeled with messy, leaky or no abstraction at all after devices used more than 100 years ago with no opportunity for radical improvement in sight ?". Sometimes I have the feeling that in software we are building skyscrapers on foundations of mud (usually after I read C code).
Fantastic!<p>This comes at a good time for me -- I'm getting interested in TTY emulation.<p>Currently on a learn-Emacs kick. Every couple of years I start using it then back off due to general cruftiness. However, it is undeniably featurefull, and the idea of just learning one last editor rather than a bunch of half-baked ones is appealing.<p>What about embedding Emacs, through a TTY interface in whatever new fancy cool TM editor experiment you want?
The classic MacOS (not the UNIX-based one) has no terminal abstraction. The basic mechanism of the system is a GUI. That was a good move. (Not having a CPU dispatcher was a bad move; the underlying MacOS is very DOS-like.)<p>Then there's X-Windows, which was explicitly designed as a terminal system. There were special-purpose X-terminals once.<p>In the phone space, things are less terminal-like. Although, amusingly, the interface to the phone modem usually accepts the Hayes AT command set.