[TUHS] More ruminations on terminals

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

I got started with UNIX, like many, at various Universities.   Model 
33’s were indeed de rigeur, but they started to be replaced by the LA-36 
DecWriters (University of MD put a bunch in because these had APL as an 
optional character set and I spent one summer learning APL which I’ve 
never used again).
We did have various CRTs including the LSI ADM-1’s (all upper case, but 
did have cursor addressing) and later the popular ADM-3.   U of M also 
had a Tektronix of some sort and the Hazeltine.    The latter used tilde 
rather than escape for the command character, to get a real tilde on the 
screen, you had to send two.   This led to a mod in the TTY driver 
referred to as “brain-damaged Hazeltine mode” with a source code comment 
of “leave poor tilde alone).

While the Model 33 could return the type element to the left in the time 
it took for the next 110 baud character to come around, other printers 
required addition of delays in the tty driver to accomodate this.   The 
later Decwriters had the ability to catch up (in addition to printing in 
both directions).

Hopkins had a Model 37 in the EE building in the room referred to as 
“the KSR room.”   This one had a greek box, and it was where most of us 
did our NROFF + EQN report generation.   The thing knew how to deal with 
all those fun ESC 8 and ESC 9 things that nroff liked to send out 
without the need for an output filter.
It also had a large NEWLINE key and returned the type box on Thank you 
for reaching out. so you didn’t have to have crmod turned on.   It was 
eventually replaced with a diablo printer which was a bit neater.   This 
held us until the early eighties when laser printers started to appear.

When I was working for Martin Marietta in Denver, I used to peruse the 
surplus depot at the company.   One day I found an ASR-37 (marked 
property of Rocky Flats for some reason).    I decided I had to have it, 
so it sat in my apartment for some time.   I had it on a modem, and it 
was amusing because it woulldn’t start the motors until DSR signal from 
the modem came on.   When the CD line came on it lit up a “PROCEED” 
button (an array of buttons on the front of the device much like the 
line buttons on a key-station telephone).    RS finally took it off my 
hands and I think he left it blocking someone’s car in a parking space 
at MCI or Sprint or something like that as a hoax.

We spent a lot of time at the Army trying to craft terminal procurements 
to get ones we like.   Mostly at the time, we wanted to get ones that 
put CONTROL next to the A rather than caps lock, but that ended up being 
a losing battle.

Our last dedicated UNIX terminals were the AT&T 5620 DMDs, the outgrowth 
of the Bell BLiT terminals, aka Jerq (the latter coined by Tom Duff if 
I’m remembering,  never made it into the official documentation, however 
many of the underlying driver code referenced J_ this or that).