PEEK and SPY have a "screen-saver" feature that may be used to allow
the watcher to see the initial contents of a user's screen when watching
begins.
Since VMS does NOT store the screen contents, and since the VMS terminal
driver just "throws away" output buffers when its done with them,
normally there is no way to see what is currently on a user's screen
when one first begins watching.
Peek/Spy could, however, be used to take control of the user's screen
and keyboard, and then enter a refresh-screen sequence to the active
program to tell it to redisplay the screen's current contents.
The drawback with this approach is that there are many VMS programs
(including DCL and many home-grown menu systems) which do NOT have
any screen-refresh command programmed into them, so this technique
doesn't ALWAYS work.
Thus for version 2.0 and upward of Peek/Spy we have added the capability
of saving the screen contents for selected users on your system so one
gets a full intial-screen display when one starts watching the user.
The way this is done differs for the VAX and the ALPHA.
Additional Information:
explode
extract