[TUHS] Early Unix and Keyboard Skills

[Clem Cole]

The 33 and 28 needed at least two null chars after the <CR> or it would
lose chars as there was no buffering.  The Unix driver has the CR delay
modes to support it.  It’s UART as it were was mechanical and a real work
of art.   I remember spending a few hours trying to figure out how it
worked.

As for the LA120 yeah you really needed to use real flow control which
could be a problem on DL11s and DZs ports.   SW flow was less than
prefect.  However, the Able version of the DH supported flow in hardware
(RTS/CTS style) so you could set them to interface with the host at 960cps
and then print as fast as possible swiping back and forth on the paper as
the local microprocessor in the decwritter buffered everything.

On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:48 PM Ronald Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> I’m not sure the model 33 required a carriage return delay.   At 110 baud
> it had plenty of time to move the carriage. back.
> Other printers (especially faster ones) weren’t so lucky, but the LA36
> decwriter had a catchup mode to print the backlog after a return.
> The LA120 was boustrophedonic so returns weren’t as much of an issue.
>
> ------ Original Message ------
> From "John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl at gmail.com>
> To jason-tuhs at shalott.net
> Cc "steve jenkin" <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au>; "TUHS" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> Date 11/2/2022 12:20:12 PM
> Subject [TUHS] Re: Early Unix and Keyboard Skills
>
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 3:02 PM <jason-tuhs at shalott.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> > I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of the
>> > CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
>>
>>
>> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.4.pdf (p23)
>>
>> > History tells us that the guys who designed [UNIX] did their own typing
>> > into the machine.  It seems to me that because of this, the main reason
>> > that UNIX enjoys/suffers from terse input and output is not through any
>> > intellectual design decisions made at some early stage but because the
>> > UNIX designers were just bad typists working on slow peripherals.
>>
>>
>>   -Jason
>>
>
> Mostly rampant speculation on my part, but with 110 baud modems, 10
> characters per second right?,
> and added delays for carriage returns, it was the peripherals that
> encouraged brevity. Code would be
> viewed multiple times, but entered roughly once.
>
> --
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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