The Wyse terminals we used with UNIX in the late 80s had 25 lines -- 24 regular lines, plus a bottom status line. Almost half of that line could be written to

The Wyse terminals we used with UNIX in the late 80s had 25 lines -- 24 regular lines, plus a bottom status line. Almost half of that line could be written to using escape sequences -- in UNIX, a simple "echo" command with the properly encoded escape sequence did the trick. In my organization, we had to install and run multiple generations of our products, and it was confusing to keep track which "world" your current environment variables pointed to. So, I, being a tinkerer by nature, wrote separate environment files for each "world" that included an echo command to echo the appropriate escape sequence so that the current environment setting could be seen at a glance in the bottom status line.