[TUHS] early Unix terminals

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

Thanks. I knew there were IBM terminals around the labs, but I don’t know
how extensive they were. The 1050 pre-dated the 2741 IIRC. And it was ½
duplex  and still needed to be attached to a modem, right.

FWIW: Ted Kowalski was the first person I knew that had a TI Silent 700
which he brought with him on his OYOC year at CMU and kept in his room to
dial into places. IIRC He also had a second telephone line that I seem to
remember was provisioned so he could dial into the USG systems without
running up huge phone charges.

He and Armando told me the TI terminals were fairly widely used in USG. I
can say I personally noticed that when visited Summit later, that seemed
about right. Plus when I spent time in Whippany, the HP 2621s seemed to be
the most common.

A quick question for you. I suspect it was not just site related, but
probably also management chain; when did actual direct hardwares
connections begin to occur?  I noticed them in Redman’s crew in WH, but the
folks I was working with were running their HP’s over phone
lines and a modem to their vaxen. I saw much of the same thing in both IH
and Columbus the few times I was at those sites.

That said and thinking a bit more, I think I saw some people in IH using
ISDN links, too. But coming from outside of the Bell System, I thought it
was unusual to me. I also remember talking to ber about it once in the
early 1980s.

FWIW: I’ve a picture somewhere that I took in the fall of 1979, of a large
pallet of around 75 custom cables that were 7-wire + gnd and shield,
terminated with DB25P on one end and DB25S the other., being delivered to
hall outside my office area. We had a cable company make for my Tek Labs
group. We eventually ran them from our 11/70 to the open air offices of our
team [raised floor in the computer room a floor above and down through the
ceiling and into cable races on our floor].   We were doing networking
research at the time and had created a small z80 based box, we called the
“Network Interface Black Box” that could talk to an Ethernet like wire. I
remember Rick LeFairve, head of CSG, seeing it and remarking that the pile
of cables was why we had to get the per unit cost out of something like the
NIBB.

Clem


As I said, their clearly the phone line culture was prevalent.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 4:26 AM Ken Thompson via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> most of the unix people used an ibm
> 134.5 baud terminal. i think the designation
> was 1050. it was a desk of electronics with
> a selectric typewriter on top. it preceded
> the tty 37.
>
> On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 11:02 PM Lars Brinkhoff via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Clem Cole wrote:
> > > There is great story about this.  Control-T came from Tenex
> >
> > And Tenex got it from BBN LISP on the 940.
> >
> > > the first TOPS-20 folks customized (hacked) OS so that depending what
> > > the load average, control-T returned different messages telling you a
> > > bit more than “Running.”  So instead of saying “Running” it started
> > > saying “Jogging”, “Walking” or “Crawling” but the administration got
> > > upset when it was most often stating “Dying.”
> >
> > On ITS, the system monitor PEEK reports the speed of a running job
> > with the fastest being WARP, then ZOOM, FLY, RUN, WALK, TENEX, and
> > the slowest being MULTIX.  (The latter two used to be CRAWL and CREEP.)
> >
> > Follow-ups should go to COFF.
> >
>