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

[steve jenkin via TUHS]

> On 21 May 2026, at 10:04, John R Levine via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> 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.
> 
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly


Prof Murray Allen had a hardware background - he authorised a lot of interesting projects there.
They built their own terminals to save money compared to commercial offerings.

UNSW's Serge Poplavsky designed and built terminals using DRAM - new at the time. [ with 4096 bits chips, 80x25 x 8 bit = 16,000 bits, 'mode' bits were extra ]
First model was TTL, 2nd model was a microprocessor. Could've been a 3rd model.

I couldn't find a reference to the 1st rollout. 
John Lions had been using one for some time before his 1978 Sabbatical at Bell Labs.

A serial-switched network was added in 1980 to connect multiple hosts.

The Serge Terminals were designed to last: students wore the paint off the sheet metal next to the keyboard from resting their arms.

Student lab terminals replaced by Apollo's and a LAN in 1988.

I have an undated Oral History note:
	"Serge Terminals - replaced Kleinschmidt terminals".

Kleinschmidt were an ASR-33 like printing terminal. Can't find good refs to them.

===============

DMR's list of home terminals
	<https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-July/032332.html>

When John Lions was at Bell Labs on sabbatical:

"Up till now I have been using a tty 43 (this listing)
...
there is a noticeable preponderance of hard copy and lack of CRT terminals."

John Lions, 15 August 1978
AUUGN Vol 1, No 1, p 21

===============

UNSW Archive file

08_224_01 Recollections_John-Lions_1992

In 1972 there were two projects under way:
    AR-16 and
    VisiCom.

AR-16 (Allen-Ruting) was a 16-bit computer not unlike the PDP-11 in many respects.
Its construction and development was the concern of two graduate students, John Hurst and Bob Zeltzer.

VisiCom (Visible Computer) was a simplified version of the AR-16 designed for teaching basic programming.
The entire memory contents was displayed in rows as groups of 4 hexadecimal characters.

As I recall, its development was entrusted to Serge Poplavsky.

	[ Serge's ME thesis: A display computer for education and system research. - He'd experience in video & char-gen ]

===============

from Ken Robinson's UNSW homepage:

kenr_CSE-Timeline-2_2007

1988: Apollo workstation laboratory opened in Electrical Engineering undercroft.

With the introduction of the Computer Engineering program in 1989 the Departmen chose to move to workstation laboratories, 
and the Apollo workstation laboratory was opened in 1988. 
Since then the School has managed a large number of workstation laboratories and individual workstations to support undergraduate, postgraduate and staff computing.

1980

A switching network was designed and began operation within the School of Electrical Engineering computer facilities.
‘The dramatic development came when a switching network (Local Automatic Computer Exchange) was designed and began operation in 1980. 
The LACE – as it was called – was an asynchronous terminal switch using time division multiplexing. 
This enabled all of the terminals to be able to be connected to any of the ever expanding number of host computers 
via a star architecture of seven nodes (in computing centres) 
and over two hundred extensions throughout. 

It was finally switched off in 1997.’ [KW Titmuss, ‘The History of Computing at the University of NSW’, December 1997, SRF – Computing Science, UNSW Archives]

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--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin