[TUHS] Control-T (was top)

[norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)]

Back in 1980 or 1981, when I first started hacking
on UNIX but still had some TOPS-10 DNA lingering in
my blood, I put in a really simple control-T
implementation.  Control-T became a new signal-
generating character in the tty driver; it sent
signal 16.  Unlike interrupt and quit, it did not
flush input or output buffers.  Unlike any other
signal, SIG_DFL caused the signal to be silently
ignored.  (I don't remember why I didn't just teach
/etc/init and login to set that signal to SIG_IGN
by default; maybe I looked and found too many other
programs that monkeyed with every signal, maybe I
just didn't think of it.)

I then wrote a little program meant to be run in the
background from .profile, that dug around in /dev/kmem,
figured out what was likely nearest-to-foreground process
associated with the same terminal, and printed a little
status info for that process.

It didn't take long for the remaining TOPS-10 DNA to
leach away, and besides it is much easier to run some
program in another window now that that is almost always
possible, so I don't miss it.  But I like that idea
better than, in effect, hacking a mini-ps into the kernel,
even though the kernel doesn't have to do as much work
to get the data.

I also thought it made more sense to have a general
mechanism that could be used for other things.  That
even happened once.  The systems I ran were used, among
other things, for developing SMP, the symbolic-manipulation
interpreter worked on by Stephen Wolfram, Geoffrey Fox,
Chris Cole, and a host of graduate and undergraduate students.
(My memory of who deserves credit differs somewhat from
that of at least one person named.)  SMP, by its nature,
sometimes had to spend a substantial time sitting and
computing.  Someone (probably Wolfram, says my aging
memory) heard about the control-T stuff, asked me how
to use it, and added code to SMP so that during a long
computation control-T would tell you something about
what it was doing and how it was progressing.

Since the signal was, like interrupt and kill, sent
to the whole process group, there was no conflict if
you also had my little control-T monitor running in
the background.

I never tried to send my hacked-up UNIX to anyone else,
so if anyone else did the same sort of control-T hack,
they likely invented it independently.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON