[9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[john]

So, first off, I've been looking (again) at some of the stuff about
the blit and gnot terminals, and I'm wondering--how widespread
were they? The commercialized versions, were many sold? They
look really cool and I'd like to find one to play with... but is my only
chance to drive to Bell Labs and root through their basement?

Reading about those terminals made me want (again) to use a portrait
layout with my Plan 9 box. If I took a regular monitor and laid it on its
side, are there options that would allow me to display on it correctly
(rotated 90 degrees)? Would I have to hack around on my own?
Thanks


John

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

I have one working that way, but on a hosted system. Tried just once
in native years ago and did not work. But that was almost a decade ago,
don't know if it would work now.

The bitsy could do it native, btw.


On 10/22/07, john@csplan9.rit.edu <john@csplan9.rit.edu> wrote:
> So, first off, I've been looking (again) at some of the stuff about
> the blit and gnot terminals, and I'm wondering--how widespread
> were they? The commercialized versions, were many sold? They
> look really cool and I'd like to find one to play with... but is my only
> chance to drive to Bell Labs and root through their basement?
>
> Reading about those terminals made me want (again) to use a portrait
> layout with my Plan 9 box. If I took a regular monitor and laid it on its
> side, are there options that would allow me to display on it correctly
> (rotated 90 degrees)? Would I have to hack around on my own?
> Thanks
>
>
> John
>
>

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[Eric Van Hensbergen]

On 10/21/07, john@csplan9.rit.edu <john@csplan9.rit.edu> wrote:
>
> Reading about those terminals made me want (again) to use a portrait
> layout with my Plan 9 box. If I took a regular monitor and laid it on its
> side, are there options that would allow me to display on it correctly
> (rotated 90 degrees)? Would I have to hack around on my own?
> Thanks
>

hosted things (like Inferno and drawterm) will "just work".  For
native, you'll have to do something on your own -- but stuff the
high-level graphics stuff is straightforward so its actually a nice
little project.  Just give us a name space interface to set the
rotation.

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[erik quanstrom]

> So, first off, I've been looking (again) at some of the stuff about
> the blit and gnot terminals, and I'm wondering--how widespread
> were they? The commercialized versions, were many sold? They
> look really cool and I'd like to find one to play with... but is my only
> chance to drive to Bell Labs and root through their basement?

http://9fans.net/archive/2002/10/497

you'll need to revive the gnot kernel, the crisp compiler (don't
know if that ever made it out of the labs).  you'll have to write
the new graphics scheme for the gnot.

- erik

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[Russ Cox]

Support for portrait screens in Plan 9 (e.g., on the bitsy)
has always depended on the underlying hardware being
able to present a portrait frame buffer, with the pixels 
still in row-major order.  That is, the "rotation" is done
in hardware, not software.

Some video cards support this; others do not.
To my knowledge, none of the current vga drivers
would provide access to such capability anyway,
but adding that (if you have helpful hardware and
know which register bit to flip) would be close to
trivial.

The easiest way to see what a gnot screen would have
been like is to boot a large monitor oriented in 
landscape mode and then run 
	
	window 0 0 800 1024 rio

to get a gnot-sized sub-rio.  Then pretend it's in black
and white and a lot slower.

Russ

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[Charles Forsyth]

> Support for portrait screens in Plan 9 (e.g., on the bitsy)
> has always depended on the underlying hardware being
> able to present a portrait frame buffer, with the pixels 
> still in row-major order.  That is, the "rotation" is done
> in hardware, not software.

the software does the rotation on the bitsy, slowly,
in flushmemscreen.
the hardware is incapable.

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[Rob Pike]

> Then pretend it's in black
> and white and a lot slower.

and connected at 1200 baud.

-rob

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[Sape Mullender]

> Support for portrait screens in Plan 9 (e.g., on the bitsy)
> has always depended on the underlying hardware being
> able to present a portrait frame buffer, with the pixels 
> still in row-major order.  That is, the "rotation" is done
> in hardware, not software.

Correct.  On the bitsy we actually did the rotation in the driver,
while copying into the frame buffer.  This only works on something
like bitsies with their tiny screens.  It'd be horrendously slow
on, say, a 1920x1200 screen.

	Sape

Re: [9fans] blit, gnot, and portrait monitors

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

john@csplan9.rit.edu wrote:
> the blit and gnot terminals, and I'm wondering--how widespread
> were they? The commercialized versions, were many sold? They
> look really cool and I'd like to find one to play with... but is my only
> chance to drive to Bell Labs and root through their basement?

The 5620 was used at a number of educational institutions,
usually with AT&T 3B2 computers.  I don't think it was widely
used otherwise, but there certainly were some customers (read
on).  With minor changes, the "xt" protocol could have been a
contender with X-Windows, had AT&T/Teletype marketing been on
the ball.  (The main disadvantage was that graphics apps were
compiled for the specific target architecture.)

I have an assortment of 5620, 630, and 730 terminals in storage,
awaiting time to clean then up and check them out.  We used these
(5620 and 630) for many years at BRL, and I still kick myself for
not hanging onto my rare white-phosphor 630 when I relocated.
I found the user interface to be sufficiently superior that I
used a 630 as my main interface to Sun workstations, despite the
limitation of the 9600 baud RS-232 port.  The Blit family needs
host support for the multiplexing; otherwise they just act as big
dumb terminals (X3.64 features comparable to the VT100).  One
also needs a downloader for window processes other than the
default terminal emulator.  (The original version of the 5620
needs to download the window manager also.)

http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/5620_faq.html
contains a lot of general information about these terminals, and
links to the software you need to properly support them.  The only
missing component is the software generation system for the 68000-
based terminals (630, 730), due to licensing restrictions.  Maybe
somebody could arrange to get that released, since it is of no
further commercial value at this point.