[TUHS] early Unix terminals (was: Re: Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C)

[G. Branden Robinson via TUHS]

At 2026-05-20T17:23:22-0700, Larry McVoy via TUHS wrote:
> > 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.

Yup, that was a DEC VT220 or maybe 320 feature.  (Others had them, but
DEC's VT series wagged a great deal of the dog.)

https://vt100.net/docs/tp83/chapter4.html

It's possible that the status line on the 25th row didn't become
entrenched until the DEC VT320, or was not host-programmable until then;
Thomas Dickey's terminfo database exhibits an "hs" capability for the
"vt320" terminal type description but not for "vt220".

https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/terminfo.5.html
https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html

If the database is inaccurate, maybe someone can help Thomas improve it.

> I think BSD had a Ctrl-T that dug info out of the kernel and displayed
> it on that line.

Yup.  With that factoid, not long ago I surprised a colleague at UNSW
who was much closer to being Present at the Creation than I could have
been.  He knew Research Unix backwards and forwards, but not BSD.

> When you are in a terminal room with 30-40 people on a 4MB VAX, Ctrl-T
> was your friend.

Unless _everybody_ learns that trick and exhibits undergrad patience,
whacking it several times a second, and all those traps into the kernel
just make the problem worse.  ;-)

Regards,
Branden
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20260520/43ffc09e/attachment.sig>