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

[John Cowan via TUHS]

On Wed, May 20, 2026, 10:06 PM Clem Cole via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

>
>  So instead of saying
> “Running” it started saying “Jogging”, “Walking” or “Crawling” but the
> administration got upset when it was most often stating “Dying.”
>

I never used Tenex or Tops-20, but I remember this feature from Tops-10 (as
well as from RSTS/E later on). But it may have been an update or local
(UPenn) hack.

>
> On the other hand one of my friends that was an undergraduate there at the
> time said, the students were able to use it as evidence that there was not
> enough compute power to serve the students.  I believe, like CMU at the
> same time, Stanford ended up with 4 2060s to replace their mainframe for
> undergrad computes.
>
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>
> On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 9:22 PM G. Branden Robinson via TUHS <
> tuhs at tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
>