I sense a hint of confusion in some of the messages
here. To lay that to rest if necessary (and maybe
others are interested in the history anyway):
As I understand it, the Blit was the original terminal,
hardware done by Bart Locanthi (et al?), software by
Rob Pike (et al?). It used an MC68000 CPU. Western
Electric made a small production run of these terminals
for use within AT&T. I don't think it was sold to the
general public.
By the time I arrived at Bell Labs in late 1984, the
Standard Terminal of 1127 was the AT&T 5620, locally
called the Jerq. This was a makeover with hardware
redesigned by a product group to use a Bellmac 32 CPU,
and software heavily reworked by a product group.
This is the terminal that was manufactured for general
sale.
I'm not sure, but I think the Blit's ROM was very basic,
just enough to be some sort of simple glass-tty or
perhaps smartass-terminal* plus an escape sequence to
let you load in new code. The Jerq had a fancier ROM,
which was a somewhat-flaky ANSI-ish terminal by default,
but an escape sequence put it into graphics-window-manager
mode, more or less like what had run a few years earlier
on the Blit.
By then the code used in Research had evolved considerably,
in particular allowing the tty driver to be exported to
the terminal (those familiar with 9term should know what
I mean). In 1127 we used a different escape sequence to
download a standalone program into the terminal and
replace the ROM window manager entirely, so we could run
our newer and (to my taste anyway) appreciably better code.
The downloaded code lived in RAM; you had to reload it
whenever the terminal was power-cycled or lost its connection
or whatnot. (It took a minute or so at 9600bps, rather
longer at 1200. This is not the only reason we jumped at
the chance to upgrade our home-computing scheme to use
9600bps over leased lines, but it was an important one.)
The V8 tape was made in late 1984 (I know that for sure
because I helped make it). It is unlikely to have anything
for the MC68000 Blit, only stuff for the Mac-32 Jerq.
Likewise for the not-really-a-release snapshots from the
9/e and 10/e eras. The 5620 ROM code is very unlikely to
be there anywhere, but the replacement stuff we used should
be somewhere.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
> If 5620s were called Jerqs, it was an accident. All the software with that
> name would be for the original, Locanthi-built and -designed 68K machines.
>
> The sequence is thus Jerq, Blit, DMD-5620
Maybe the “Jerq” name had a revival. If the processor switch came with some upheaval it is not hard to see how that revival could have happened.
The Dan Cross tar archive with the source code has two top level directories, one named “blit" with the 68K based source and another one named “jerq" with the Bellmac based source. The tar archive seems to have been made in the summer of 1985, or at least those dates are on the top level directories.
I am of course not disputing that the original name was Jerq. There are many clues in the source supporting that, among which this funny comment in mcc.c:
int jflag, mflag=1; /* Used for jerq. Rob Pike (read comment as you will) */
Bit hard to classify this one; separate posts since COFF was created?
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron), was
born on this day in 1815; arguably the world's first computer programmer and a
highly independent woman, she saw the potential in Charles Babbage's
new-fangled invention.
J.F.Ossanna was given unto us on this day in 1928; a prolific programmer, he
not only had a hand in developing Unix but also gave us the ROFF series.
Who'ld've thought that two computer greats would share the same birthday?
-- Dave
Moo and hunt-the-wumpus got quite a lot of play
both in the lab and at home. Wump was an instant
hit with my son who was 4 or 5 years old at the
time.
Amusingly, I speculated on how to generate degree-3
graphs for wump, but obviously not very deeply. It
was only much later that I realized the graph
always had the same topology--a dodecahedron.
Doug\
We lost Dr. John Lions on this day in 1998; he was one of my Comp Sci
lecturers (yes, I helped him write The Book, and yes, you'll find my name
in the back).
-- Dave
I’m looking for the origins of SLIP and PPP on Unix. Both seem to have been developed long before their RFC’s appeared.
As far as I can tell, SLIP originally appeared in 3COM’s UNET for the PDP11, around 1980. From the TUHS Unix tree, first appearance in BSD seems to be 4.3 (1986).
Not sure when PPP first appeared, but the linux man page for pppd has a credit that goes back to Carnegie Mellon 1984. First appearance in BSD seems to be FreeBSD 5.3 (2004), which seems improbably late (same source).
Paul
Hello All.
Anyone who pulled the code for v10spell that I made available a few
months ago should 'make clean', 'git pull', and 'make'.
A critical bug has been fixed for 64 bit systems, and the code has
had some additional cleanups and the doc updated some as well.
The repos is at git://github.com/arnoldrobbins/v10spell.
Enjoy,
Arnold
