Prior to standardization there was ioctl(...FIONBIO...) and fcntl(...O_NDELAY...), but these behaved inconsistently between systems, and even within the same system. For example, it was common for FIONBIO to work on sockets and O_NDELAY to work on ttys, with a lot of inconsistency for things like pipes, fifos, and devices. And if you didn't know what kind of file descriptor you had, you'd have to set both to be sure. But in addition, a non-blocking read with no data available was also indicated inconsistently; depending on the OS and the typ...