Finding out about your terminal

Because of the overall design of BMS, and device-dependent support in particular, you generally do not need to know much about your terminal to format for it. However, if you need to know the characteristics of your principal facility, you can use the ASSIGN and INQUIRE commands.

You can tell, for example, whether your terminal supports a particular extended attribute, what national language is in use, screen size, and so on. This type of information applies whether you are using BMS or terminal control to communicate with your terminal. You need it more often for terminal control, and so the options that apply are described in Finding out about your terminal.

There are also ASSIGN options specific to BMS, but you need them most often when you use the ACCUM option, and so these are described later, in ASSIGN options for cumulative processing.