[TUHS] TTY8

[Clem cole]

DZ did yet exist. They were developed as part of 11/34 project - iirc Jeff Mitchel had his hand in them.

In the begin of the pdp11 there was the DC11, the KL/DL11 and the DH11 as traditional serial ports using a Gordon Bell invented and DEC patented UART - which came from the PDP8 program  :-)

IIRC Ken originally had statically named the serial devices for Unix although I’ve forgotten the assignment but the DL11 was tty8 and tty9 and DC11 started at 0.   DL11 were terrible I/O devices which is why the DH was created.  The idea from DEC was that you were supposed to use DH/DM pairs to support your terminals and modems on pdp11s.  

I suspect Ken/ BTL was following the DEC hardware rules and just modeled the Unix naming to match. 

In practice most sites had a single KL as the console and the used DZ and DH’s and had a script/makefile in /dev to create banks of device 8 or 16  at a time.  

Btw. I’ve forgotten the details the DC as we did not use them at CMU nor Tektronix or UCB by the time I got there  [We used either real DHs sometimes DZ but not if I could stop it or at CMU a locally created device called a ASLI. Later once they came on the scene most Unix sites I knew used Able DHDMs because they were cheaper than DZs, took less bus  space (single card for 16 ports) and of course were DMA so they worked better.   

FYI not to complain my small disappointment with simh has been the DH emulator.  The sim folks are assuming dz so never really worked to fix it.  It’s on my Long want to do list to figure out why. 

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Nov 25, 2017, at 10:43 AM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> 
> OK, we were discussing terminals this morning with some other old guys.   If I knew the answer to this I’ve forgotten.
> Every PDP-11 UNIX I ever used had the console KL-11 as /dev/tty8.   The question is why.    My guess is that for some reason
> an 8 terminal multiplexor (DZ-11?) was stuck at tty0, but why?
>  
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