From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <438ad7474ddf6a9ea6ac10294f1ae808@collyer.net> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Gnot From: Geoff Collyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 03:05:15 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0d6aa244-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 I haven't seen a gnot in years. I think there were still a few in use when I started at AT&T in 1994. Adequate PCs now are cheaper (and a good deal more studly) than gnots were then (my notes from a talk Rob gave in 1987 say ``gnots cost US$5,000''). People other than Bart knew what was in gnots. Surely Rob Pike did. Ted Kowalski probably did. There was a paper by Bart called ``This is Gnot Hardware'', but I don't know if it ever made it to the outside world. A very quick history of this stuff is that Rob invented the Blit in about 1980 (maybe 1981) shortly after joining the Labs. It used an 8 MHz 68000 CPU, 256K bytes of RAM, a small ROM, an 800x1024 portrait-mode monochrome (green on black) display, no MMU, no fans, no disks and its own little window system and OS (variously called mpx, mux, layers). I believe this even preceded the Sun-1. Graphics leaned heavily on the bitblt operator and graphics programming was relatively painless (certainly compared to X11). It connected to a Unix host via serial line and provided quite a pleasant window system without Unix knowing much about it. The Blit got commercialised by Teletype, who swapped the processor for the Western Electric 32000 and generally increased the price and sold the result as the DMD 5620 for something like US$5,620 (easy for the sales force to remember :-). Teletype then reversed themselves and swapped the processor back to a 68010, I believe, replaced the sturdy metal case with a flimsy plastic one, dropped the price somewhat and sold the result as the MTG 630. There was a follow-on, the 730, that could optionally connect to its host(s) via Ethernet and could even run X11 (you can see the influence of marketting droids). The gnot, as noted earlier, attempted to use some of the 630 or 730 hardware but included an MMU. (My notes say ``essentially a Teletype 630 with a [AT&T] CRISP CPU instead of a 68k, a [AT&T] Datakit connection instead of a serial port, an MMU, and lots of memory.'') The gnot and early Plan 9 terminals in general used what looks to me like a slightly mutated Blit bitblt interface for graphics. It grew support for grey-scale and then colour displays and lasted through the 2nd edition release, as I recall. It was replaced by raw rasters (/dev/graphics), and then Rob invented the draw interface, tried it out in Inferno and then had Russ put it into Plan 9 in time for the 3rd edition release. At least that's how I remember it.