[TUHS] Teletypes used for early Unix

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, July 29th, 2025 at 6:15 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 10:27:23AM +1000, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> 
> > "The remote-batch load absorbs about 5 per cent of the 11/70 and its
> > residual capacity is used to serve nearly 50 interactive terminals.
> 
> 
> I still remember, fondly (sort of) being in a terminal room with 50+
> other students all hooked up to a 4MB VAX 780. The fondness was the
> sort of bonding we all had from pulling all nighters to get stuff to
> work (this was at UW-Madison, back then it was a hard core hacking
> school, lots of Sun's kernel group came from Madison, including
> Rusty (NFS) and Mojo (he wrote the 4.x VM system) and a bunch of
> others).
> 
> The not so fond part was hit ^T over and over again (it gave you
> a one line PS like output showing load) while your compiled seemed
> swapped out forever.
> 
> The not fondness made me take out one of the very few loans I have had,
> in 1985ish I borrowed $2000 to buy a Okidata CPM machine, it was a lot
> slower than the VAX, but all the cycles were mine. I wrote a lot of
> code on that machine. Including assembler versions of cp, rm, ls,
> etc, each of which fit in 512 bytes because that was one sector on
> a floppy disk, I didn't want to wait for more than one sector to
> load. Fun times. Now my phone is like 10,000x faster and has
> easily that much more memory.
> 
> --lm

Larry if you don't mind my curiosity, were these UNIX-y utilities sitting on top of and using CP/M services or chomping at the hardware a little more closely?  Or something else?

- Matt G.