All of this goes to show that the Unix-haters were right.

The Tenex line of operating systems from DEC had built-in session management in the 1970s. Unix still doesn't have it. All non-trivial terminal handling was kept in user-space. Therefore, programs had to make assumptions that are now hard-coded in their very design.

To this day, the Linux and BSD kernels assume that they're talking to a VT100 with a few frills. The commercial Unix kernels were worse; I used a SunOS tutorial in the mid-90s that started me off on ed (yes, the standard editor; the man page even called it that without qualification) because Sun started out with an older version of BSD that assumed teletypes.

This has had consequences. The major reason why microcomputers took off was because an Apple ][ running VisiCalc could do things that a terminal connected to a mini/mainframe computer could not do.

Here we are, living in the future, where wristwatches have true color displays, and household appliances run webservers, but the correct, macho, hipster-approved user interface would be shamed by an Amiga 1000.

/rant