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

[Larry McVoy via TUHS]

On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 08:04:53PM -0400, John R Levine via TUHS wrote:
> On Wed, 20 May 2026, Clem Cole wrote:
> >>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. ...
> 
> Everyone's experience was different.  The Unix system I used in a lab at
> Princeton only had the ASR-33 TTY.  The one I ran at Yale had the TTY
> console and a bunch of unique homebrewed bitmap terminals that I wrote up in
> an article in Software Practice and Experience.

I don't have a lot to add to this other than there was some terminal, I think
a VT-something, that had the standard 80x24 but it had a 25th line that was
the status line.  I think BSD had a Ctrl-T that dug info out of the kernel
and displayed it on that line.

When you are in a terminal room with 30-40 people on a 4MB VAX, Ctrl-T
was your friend.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat