[TUHS] virtual consoles / Alt-Fx

[Brad Spencer]

Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> writes:

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?

Not Unix, but OS-9 Level II on the CC3 had them.  Not exactly a console,
as a fixed console device really did not exist in the same way as Unix
on OS-9, but multiple shells each running in their own screen with
different sizes if I recall correctly.  This would have all been in the
early to mid 1980s in a 8/16 bit environment.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org