[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[Mary Ann Horton via TUHS]

This is bringing back so many wonderful memories. I was at UW-Madison 
from 76 to 78 but we just had an 11/45 running V6 and an array of dumb 
terminals. In 19777, that was my intro to UNIX and I was soooo hooked. 
My main contribution was the hed editor - an enhanced ed. I was very 
loyal to it until Bill Joy gave me vi.

After I transferred to Berkeley in 78, my PhD dissertation was what I 
called a "language editor". The Reps/Teitelbaum CPS system was one of my 
inspirations. I didn't realize they had it running on a Terak - I'd 
never heard of it until now. And I didn't know UW-Madison was using 
Terak workstations around 1980. Even when I went to Bell Labs, I didn't 
get a GUI until 88 when I got a BLIT. (IBM PCs didn't count.)

CPS and many similar systems had you edit program parse trees rather 
than editing text. Instead of inserting and deleting text, you'd graft 
and prune trees. It was a creative idea, but I felt it was too 
restrictive on the user. Syntax errors were impossible, comments were 
part of the syntax and could only go in certain places. My approach was 
that you'd edit the tree, but with a textual user interface, so I built 
a mechanism for arbitrary text attached to a node in the tree. My tool, 
Babel, would perform incremental parsing and semantic error checking and 
highlight errors as soon as the text operation completed. (Eclipse and 
MS Visual Studio followed, but I wasn't involved.)

Babel ran on Ernie (a VAX 11/780) and was horribly slow. A typical 
insertion took about 1 minute. It worked but wasn't a useful tool.

Was CPS used by students on the Terak? How was the experience? I'm 
curious how CPS performance was on the Terak.

Processors are just a bit faster now...  A few years ago I briefly 
brought up 3BSD on simh and ran the Babel binary. It was speedy, but I'd 
used the BREAK key to begin commands, and that doesn't translate today. 
One of these days I'll port it to modern C and play with it.

Thanks,

/Mary Ann Horton/ (she/her/ma'am)
       Keynote Speaker on Inclusion and Innovation
       Award Winning Author
maryannhorton.com <https://maryannhorton.com>



On 11/1/26 08:00, John Foust via TUHS wrote:
> 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