[TUHS] Control-T in UNIX

[Jonathan Gray via TUHS]

inexpensive twenex-style ^T for 4.2 (and 4.1)
Rehmi Post in net.unix-wizards, Mar 29, 1985
https://groups.google.com/g/net.unix-wizards/c/wt3mEa_KhFg/m/rM6F4uDL4UgJ
(offers to send patches)

Twenex-Like ^T for 4.1BSD
Chris Torek in net.sources, Jun 20, 1985
https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources/c/lPpvF_3sC2o/m/3D9bkufBBBUJ

Twenex-Like ^T for 4.2BSD Vax
Chris Torek in net.sources, Jun 20, 1985
https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources/c/BfyFp1p_-t0/m/jbKhhVGQKhsJ

Twenex-Like ^T for Pyramid kernel
Chris Torek in net.sources, Jun 20, 1985
https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources/c/VKBnM6hIPRU/m/O5UwiKoXnIAJ

control-T for 4.3BSD
Chris Torek in comp.bugs.4bsd, May 28, 1987
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.bugs.4bsd/c/IeMLfBjx4JM/m/uOgCAgXMrusJ

Quite different to what went into 4.3BSD-Reno.

Chris on the history via stackoverflow, included below
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39883417/what-info-does-ctrl-t-show-during-a-terminal-git-push

"This status-printing, and the existence of the status character itself,
is derived from code written by myself and Rehmi Post (with input from
several others; Fred Blonder quite possibly had a hand in it, plus of
course the grad students we had that came from Stanford and MIT) back
when I was at the University of Maryland, in the mid-to-late 1980s. The
SIGINFO signal and the NOKERNINFO control flag were added later, in the
1990s (or perhaps even a bit later).

(As I recall, ITS, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, and/or TENEX/TWENEX all had
something like this. I never used any of those myself but that is where
the idea came from.)"

On Sun, May 24, 2026 at 02:58:56PM -0600, Arnold Robbins via TUHS wrote:
> To be clear, it was Chris Torek's patch that we put into 4.2 and 4.3.
> I didn't develop it.
> 
> Reese Johnson via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> > Wow! Thank you so much. I'm a bit younger but I really love Unix. I am
> > located in Georgia too. I use ^T all the time still on FreeBSD. I had
> > no idea GT had something to do with it. Nice to meet you all. This list
> > is so amazing.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Reese KN4NTU
> > 73
> >
> > On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 01:23:02PM -0600, Arnold Robbins via TUHS wrote:
> > > It was indeed posted to USENET, but didn't (IIRC) make it into the
> > > official 4.3 BSD release.
> > > 
> > > Scott Lee and I put it in to 4.2 BSD at Georgia Tech, and I think I
> > > put it into 4.3BSD + Mt. Xinu at Emory.
> > > 
> > > At GT, I remember a professor who came from MIT being pleasantly
> > > surprised to learn that we had ^T on the vax. :-)
> > > 
> > > Rich Salz via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > My recollection is that Chris Torek at University of Maryland added control
> > > > t to the bsd tty driver and it was made available in 4.3 or so. It was
> > > > posted to Usenet which is where I read about it
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:02 AM Ron Natalie via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > When Mike Muuss was playing with enhancing the UNIX scheduler in our
> > > > > (largely V6 based) kernels, we had access to some of the DEC-10 OS’s
> > > > > that did have control-T.
> > > > > Mike added that to our kernel (llisting all the processes running on the
> > > > > terminal) so he could get some feedback on what his tweaks were doing.
> > > > >
> > > > > -Ron
> > > > >
> > > > >