[TUHS] First CRT terminal on Unix?

Angelo Papenhoff aap at papnet.eu
Thu Nov 23 07:33:49 AEST 2017


On 23/11/17, Nigel Williams wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 6:40 AM, Nigel Williams
> <nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
> > I suspect the VT05 was not popular as it was slow, uppercase only, 72
> > characters x 20 lines, and not cursor addressable (much like Teletypes
> > of that time).
> 
> I am wrong, DEC VT05 was cursor addressable, it could even erase to end of line.
> 
> 3.8 Direct Cursor Addressing (CAD)
> 
> https://vt100.net/docs/vt05-rm/chapter3.html#S3.8
> 
> Through the use of CAD (0168), the cursor can be directed to any one
> of the 1440 character locations on the CRT screen using three
> instructions. The CAD function is used to allow updating of displayed
> data without retransmitting the complete page.

I wrote a VT05 emulator some while ago: https://github.com/aap/vt05
It's certainly not perfect and probably has some bugs, but I somehow had
the urge to write it for no particular reason.
I would actually be interested in the newline delay the machine needs
because I didn't implement it. 

I hope this doesn't derail the discussion too much, but I would actually
like to know which teletypes were used at bell labs. What strikes me as
odd is that in UNIX lower case is the norm yet the ASR-33, which I would
assume was ubiquitous, does only to upper case and also doesn't do some
characters used by C, like {}. In this famous photo you see ASR-33s...so
were they really the main interface to early UNIX?
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kd14.jpg

aap



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