resetting tty1

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, May 03, 2007, Man-wai Chang wrote:
>
>The screen of tty1 is frozen. Hitting all keys got no responsse.
>
>I tried `killall getty`, no luck.
>
>how could I restore it?

The first thing you might try is typing ``ctrl-q'' (the xon character)
which will restart things after pressing ``ctrl-s'' (the xoff flow control
character).

The xon/xoff characters have been used in serial communications for decades
to permit in-band flow control.  A sure sign of a software developer who
grew up on micros, and not on dumb terminals is one who uses ctrl-s and/or
ctrl-q for functions (can we spell the WordStar Diamond :-).

Back in the day when I was managing Radio Shack Computer Centers, the
TRSDOS version of their Scripsit word processing program used ctrl-s for
something (probably search).  When RS came out with the Model 12 and Model
16 systems they added function keys around the numeric keypad to make it
easy for people doing data entry to hit them without taking their hand from
the keypad.  Unfortunately the function key immediately above the ENTER key
sent ctrl-s, which would hang the session when running Xenix.  I don't know
how many calls I had were somebody said their machine was broken because of
this.  Whoever designed the keyboard was trying to be efficient, but didn't
understand that this might cause problems.

Bill
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