[TUHS] Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C

[G. Branden Robinson via TUHS]

Hi Clem,

At 2026-05-20T18:29:40-0400, Clem Cole via TUHS wrote:
> On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 6:04 PM John Levine via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> > Nice post but I can tell you from experience that Model 37 Teletypes
> > were quite rare outside the Bell companies.
> 
> Definitely true
> 
> > I think I saw one once.
> 
> I did see them in some places.  Microsoft's 11/70 (Miss Piggy) had one
> as its console (I suspect it still does, I have to ask Stephen Jones
> as he has the system at the ICM).
> 
> > Other than that we all used the Model 33 because it was cheap and
> > reliable and we typed \( \) and dealt with it.
>
> I disagree here. By November 1973 (Research Fourth Edition release
> date), many/most of us might have used an ~$1500 ASR-33 as the
> console, while, most often (though somewhat pricey - often $3K-$5 -
> think the DEC VT05), glass terminals had already been widely adopted.
> They were the primary terminals at every institution I was part of
> during that time.  For reference, in 1970, the Tek 4010s were going
> for $4K-$10K, and they could not make them fast enough. You should
> also consider that Research Sixth Edition was released in May of 1975,
> and Lear Siegler announced the ADM-3A in July of 1976 for $995 as a
> kit or $1045 assembled.

Thanks for raising this.  When I'm explaining to people why groff works
the way it does--and why I support Werner Lemberg's decision about 25
years ago to start assuming that a "terminal device" to which nroff
writes is much more likely to be [an emulator of] a vaguely
ECMA-48-compliant video terminal than of a hammer-or-typeball-or-chain-
and-paper terminal--I often find myself having to explain that AT&T
nroff was never a termcap or terminfo application.  (This less surprises
people than it reveals that they hadn't even considered the possibility
in the first place.  Whole generations of Unix people have come up not
knowing that a Teletype machine was a "terminal", and at least one now
that hasn't seen a CRT.)

I'm aware that by the 1980s, the Bell Labs CSRC was interested in
developing a graphical terminal--namely the portrait-mode Jerq/Blit/DMD
5620.

And early (mid-'70s) troff did support document previewing on Tektronix
4014 terminals.

I had thought that the CSRC's hands-off approach to video terminals was
that (a) it "wasn't research", and (b) more a matter of the DEC VT100
showing up and commencing to eat the world, and Berkeley manifesting a
resolve to attack the problem of character-cell video terminal support
with its termcap library.

Your comment extends my timeline backward, which isn't inconsistent with
my story but leaves me wondering what the thinking was in earlier days,
prior to 1978/9.  AT&T did in fact hire the termcap developer away from
Berkeley to craft terminfo--but that was in the 1980s.

What's the mid-1970s rationale for AT&T ignoring this segment of the
market, when it cannot have been a secret that people were using these
devices to interface with Unix?  I think I get why Research didn't dirty
their hands with it.  But it should have been solidly within USG/
"Program Generic"'s wheelhouse.  And eventually it was, but took
something like 7 years to get there.

What gives?

Regards,
Branden
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