[wang_li]

You are confusing the unix terminal model with specific terminals. The TTY concept doesn't mandate an 80x24 text only device. Outside of applications that specifically rely upon the existence of a directly addressable grid of characters, Unix TTYs and PTYs would work perfectly fine in a mathematica notebook style interface.

[anthk]

9front went further; you don't need to care about TTY's and PTY's any more except for the 'vt' tool which was made OFC to connect to Unix terminals and to run some legacy software thru APE/NPE (minimal POSIX compat modules).

The core concept of Unix weren't the terminals, but text, pipes and the orthogonal composability. rc under 9front doesn't need a terminal emulating some DEC hardware crudely. You get a shell not bound to sizes. Scripts run in the same way, but with superior editing capabilities.