> I'm having a really interesting email conversation with
> Robert Kennedy about this. I'm a little surprised that those
> keystrokes were chosen despite their historical use in
> software handshaking.  Robert seems to be suggesting that
> unix (and it's derivatives) /depend/ on hardware handshaking
> (apologies to Robert if I've got that wrong).

emacs is not unix-specific.

As I understand it, it was first implemented on 36-bit DEC mainframes
and was later ported/reimplemented, with command set intact, on a
large number of platforms, including unix.

The emacs authors viewed XON/XOFF flow control as a fundamentally
broken concept because (among other things) it's in-band (consuming
two character codes which could otherwise be used as editor commands
;-) ), and because it is not robust against dropped characters .. if
an XON gets dropped, communication wedges.

					- Bill