[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[John Foust via TUHS]

At 08:55 AM 11/1/2026, Larry McVoy wrote:
>All that is to say, John, I don't remember Teraks.  I definately remember
>the terminal room with ~40 terminals hooked up to a VAX 780 (and I
>fondly remember slovax that had the BSD source on it, I got an account
>on there eventually and spent a lot of time reading.  Ever since then,
>my main machine has been slovax.  slovax is mcvoy.com).
>So where were the Teraks?  I probably got serious in CS around
>1982 or 83.  Were they still somewhere?

The Teraks were used to teach UCSD Pascal to entry-level CS classes
and business school programming courses, but they were far more 
attractive to other CS students because they were $20,000 
PDP-11/03 equivalents with mono bitmap graphics and one to 
four 8" floppies.  

To be fair, the Teraks were often used as terminals by people
sharp enough to have a Terak disk that ran a terminal emulator
and connected to their favorite mainframe over the Gandalf 
serial port switching network.  Each Terak had a Gandalf.

The Teraks were in their own room in the middle area of
the CS basement.  You could find them in the math department, too.
Yes, there were terminal rooms full of glass TTYs.
If the terminal room was full and the Teraks were empty,
you could use a Terak as a terminal.

There were a few students who were trying to craft their own
Unix-alikes for it.  You could run RT-11 if you had the disks.
There was a more true Unix for the Terak, but I think it was
developed in Minnesota and either hadn't made it to Wisconsin
when I was there or it was still in development by the time I left.

Prof. Teitelbaum's grad student was Tom Reps who went to UW-Madison
to teach after the CSP project at Cornell.  The CSP is regarded as
a milestone on the road to IDEs, as one of the firsts.

The CSP was developed using tools from both environments.  Its
disks are in UCSD p-System format, but the executables appear
to have been cross-compiled from a V7 mainframe.

But my memories of you are that you were in all those rooms, too.

This might jog your memory:

https://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/

Paul Haeberli of SGI was cutting his teeth on Teraks at UW-Madison.
Tom Christiansen of Perl was, too.  There's a few other UW names
in the fine print there.  Prof. Bart Miller might've had something
to do with the Teraks, as he was under Bowles at UCSD.

- John