[TUHS] virtual consoles / Alt-Fx

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 9:13 AM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> Thinking a bit more about terminal multiplexing was a major use case for
> early X, I recalled using Linux virtual consoles in the late 90’s for this
> purpose.
>
> According to Wikipedia, virtual consoles originated with Xenix and before
> that with concurrent CP/M.
>
> Perusing the documentation of those on Bitsavers, I can see that virtual
> consoles have a prominent mention in the manual for concurrent CP/M (1983),
> but not those of its forerunners MP/M II and MP/M (1979). I cannot find a
> mention of virtual consoles in Xenix documentation as late as 1988.
>

Venix/86R 1.0 Boston Softwre Works Edition had virtual consoles. It was
released in 1986.
https://groups.google.com/g/mod.newprod/c/iYLc3cdnyms/m/Him5XgqwT70J is a
reference. However, it was inspired by Xenix and Microport System V/AT
according to the author. The stock version of Venix/86R 1.0 didn't have
them, nor did the PC version that we have some sources for. Here's the
relevant bits from the blurb:

Virtual consoles, as found in VENIX on IBM-compatible machines, and also in
XENIX and Microport System V/AT.

But also interesting was:

Support for simultaneous use of a monochrome display (for terminal/console
use) and a color graphics display (for graphics).

which I thought interesting at the time, but was pretty old-school Unix
Workstation by then.

No such thing as a virtual (as distinct from pseudo) tty on 16-bit Unix or
> early 32-bit, as far as I know; one could argue it does not make much sense
> with physical terminals. Wikipedia says no such thing existed on SunOS
> either.
>
> I think virtual consoles where present in Linux from a very early point.
>

Ditto for the 386BSD BSD/386 line of  code. I think they were added in the
patch-kit phase, not the original Jolitz code phase. FreeBSD 1.0 Beta had
them in 1993 for sure, as did NetBSD of the time.

I have a memory of them on 0.98pl13 on Linux as well, but that version
sticks in my head as a proxy for anything between 0.96 (the first one I
tried) and 0.99 (the last before 1.x Linux). This would be approximately
1992 or 1993.

I've not done the deep-dive into the ancient code bases to see if I can
suss out when they arrived.


> So, as far as I can tell virtual consoles were invented for concurrent
> CP/M around 1983, made their way to Xenix in the late 80’s and became part
> of Linux in the early 90’s.
>
> Have I missed other prior art?
>

Maybe a little. Good information about Microport System V is kinda hard to
come by these days...

Warner
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