[TUHS] AT&T Blit terminal plus terminal OS

[lm@bitmover.com (Larry McVoy)]

My fond memories, if my old brain doesn't fail me, is being a TA at
the University of Wisconsin.  I shared an office with another TA,
we had one BLIT but I managed to scrounge another one.  We had a
serial line that ran from our building to the building that had 
all the vaxen, just one.

So I bread boarded some 8051's (I think that's them, they were 8 bit
computers that you could flash).  What I noticed was that all the stuff
we did was 8 bit clean, only used the lower 7.  So, 8th bit was the mux.
On was me, off was my office mate.  I programmed the 8051's and convinced
the lab (run by Paul Beebe, he still around?  Wouldn't be surprised if
he's on the list) to let me stick one in there, the other in our office,
presto!  Two BLITs and two extremely happy TA's.

I *loved* the BLIT, it was pretty much everything I wanted from a terminal,
it was like the NCD Xterminal only a decade or two sooner.  And kind of 
more cool because it worked over a serial line.

--lm

P.S. Pretty cool that I'm responding to the guy who wrote yacc.  Thanks
for that, I've gotten a lot done with lex/yacc over the years.  As have
countless other people.  Might be interesting to hear your storie about
what people have done with yacc - has anyone ever added up how many
yacc grammers there are out there?

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 04:00:53PM -0700, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
> This brings back fond memories.  Applications running on the main computer
> downloaded custom code to run on the Blit--this was the biggest
> challenge--writing an application to run on two machines at once, with two
> different OS's, different hardware and different endian-ness.  When it was
> working, it was great, but debugging new code could be a real challenge.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> > Like this:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/87479714 at N05/8087576305/
> >
> > That one has the Bell Labs USB modification, and works like a charm under
> > Windows 7! :)
> >
> > -Ben
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > From: tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org [tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org] on
> > behalf of Brantley Coile [brantley at coraid.com]
> > Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 11:47 AM
> > To: Brian Zick
> > Cc: tuhs at tuhs.org; arnold at skeeve.com
> > Subject: Re: [TUHS] AT&T Blit terminal plus terminal OS
> >
> > Like a lady bug with no spots.  I have a 730 in my office.
> >
> > iPhone email
> >
> > On Oct 14, 2012, at 11:18 AM, "Brian Zick" <artistenator at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>> I used a 5620 for a while, hooked up to a BSD 4.1 Vax. The vax was
> >>> overloaded
> >>> so things were slow, but it was a relatively pleasant environment. The
> >>> keyboard
> >>> was really nice, and there are still people who pine for the 3-button
> >>> round
> >>> Depraz (sp?) mouse... :-)
> >>
> >> What does a Blit 3-button round Depraz mouse look like? I've searched,
> >> but alas I have not found.
> >>
> >> Brian Zick
> >> zickzickzick.com
> >> _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
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-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com