[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Doug McIlroy]

> Interesting that they had both - I don't remember hearing about the 37
> but that doesn't mean much. :-)

The only model 33 on any PDP11 in Bell Labs research was the console.
Otherwise all terminals were ASCII devices. Model 37's predated Unix.

doug

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[arnold]

Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > Interesting that they had both - I don't remember hearing about the 37
> > but that doesn't mean much. :-)
>
> The only model 33 on any PDP11 in Bell Labs research was the console.
> Otherwise all terminals were ASCII devices. Model 37's predated Unix.
>
> doug

So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?

Thanks for the info.

Arnold

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?

Nope; it was 5-bit Baudot (technically ITA2).  Upper case only, and there 
were codes to shift between letters and figures.  Grep thee the net for 
"ASR33".

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

> 
>> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
> 
> Nope; it was 5-bit Baudot (technically ITA2).  Upper case only, and there 
> were codes to shift between letters and figures.  Grep thee the net for 
> "ASR33".

I've used an ASR33 with an PDP-8-E, an ASR33 with an opto coupler
to some tymeshare services and an ASR35 as a console to an PDP-8-I
but theses where all ASCII.  According to wikipedia "A companion
Model 32 used the more established five-level Baudot code."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33>.

More teletype history at <http://www.pdp8online.com/asr33/asr33.shtml>

And have a look at the picture of Ken & ennis with two 33's
<http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/picture.html> and comments
from dmr. Note te ASCII keyboard.

	jaap

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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

arnold at skeeve.com scripsit:

> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?

The keyboard could send all of ASCII except lower-case letters, grave,
braces, and vertical bar (i.e. excluding x60 to x7E).  The high-order
bit was always set.  Using the paper tape reader and punch, you could
transmit arbitrary 8-bit characters.

It was the model 32 that was Baudot.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Dream projects long deferred usually bite the wax tadpole.
        --James Lileks

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Steve Nickolas]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:

> arnold at skeeve.com scripsit:
>
>> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
>
> The keyboard could send all of ASCII except lower-case letters, grave,
> braces, and vertical bar (i.e. excluding x60 to x7E).  The high-order
> bit was always set.  Using the paper tape reader and punch, you could
> transmit arbitrary 8-bit characters.

Sounds like an Apple ][+ keyboard.

-uso.

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:

> > So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
> 
> The keyboard could send all of ASCII except lower-case letters, grave,
> braces, and vertical bar (i.e. excluding x60 to x7E).  The high-order
> bit was always set.  Using the paper tape reader and punch, you could
> transmit arbitrary 8-bit characters.

I guess it was common to use the Teletype Model 33 independently without 
any video display. (I read that it could accommodate a modem too.) Did 
it automatically print to paper everything typed to keyboard in 
real-time?  Or maybe only when LINE FEED or RE-TURN key was pressed?

How would RUB OUT be used when using the sh shell? (I tried looking 
through the code and manual for some old 32V and previous versions but 
didn't see code for it yet.)

When did the sh shell provide intra-line editing?

Were the early Unix versions case insensitive? (Like could I run "DaTe" 
from shell?) If not, how to get the model-33 to work with it?

What about the model-33 printer? Did it print lowercase?

How was the "HERE IS" key programmed? Was it used in Unix?

What was the "REPT" key used for?

I also noticed there wasn't any tilde key. So I looked at some old Unix 
code and didn't see tilde used for home directory until 1980 csh. But 
how was tilde entered for previous uses? (Maybe I just overlooked on 
keyboard.)

Was there any concept of intra-line editing when using a model-33 -- but 
without seeing what is being typed or having it print over (and over) 
same line content? (I should assume that intra-line editing can only 
happen on video terminals.)

(My book in progress explains a lot about the history of ex/vi but 
the earliest version I have is 1.1 which included the support for 
intra-line editing and even visual mode for HP 2645 and LSI ADM-3A 
cursor-addressible terminals. I am hoping my book can also introduce the 
basic usage concepts for readers who have no familiarity with the 
hardware around then. One of the TUHS list participants and termcap/vi 
developer already told me some about the hjkl arrow keys, for example.)

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Armando Stettner]

My answers, embedded though I'm sure millions will reply.  From my recollection....

  aps



Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia.net>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] terminal - just for fun
> Date: August 6, 2014 at 8:26:22 AM PDT
> To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
> 
> On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:
> 
>>> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
>> 
>> The keyboard could send all of ASCII except lower-case letters, grave,
>> braces, and vertical bar (i.e. excluding x60 to x7E).  The high-order
>> bit was always set.  Using the paper tape reader and punch, you could
>> transmit arbitrary 8-bit characters.
> 
> I guess it was common to use the Teletype Model 33 independently without 
> any video display. (I read that it could accommodate a modem too.) Did 
> it automatically print to paper everything typed to keyboard in 
> real-time?  Or maybe only when LINE FEED or RE-TURN key was pressed?

The 33 was capable of full-duplex so this depended upon what it was talking to (or how it was optioned).  Teletype did have an OEM acoustically coupled modem on 33's (and 32's??).  In the "barebones" version, they were current-loop machines (make-brake contacts to represent the 1's and 0's for the code).  There was also an OEM option for RS232.


> How would RUB OUT be used when using the sh shell? (I tried looking 
> through the code and manual for some old 32V and previous versions but 
> didn't see code for it yet.)

When you pressed RUBOUT, the 'deleted' character was printed on the paper by the system to which the 33 was connected and removed from the butter (pointer moved backwards, etc.).


> When did the sh shell provide intra-line editing?

I first experienced this with the CSH but maybe there were others before.


> Were the early Unix versions case insensitive? (Like could I run "DaTe" 
> from shell?) If not, how to get the model-33 to work with it?

I recall that there was an STTY command that would allow case to be ignored.  Remember, the shell would look for a file name in a set of directories (later, $PATH) for the file name to fork/exec.

> What about the model-33 printer? Did it print lowercase?

I do not believe so.

> How was the "HERE IS" key programmed? Was it used in Unix?

32's and 33's were focused on Telex and TWX services.  Hence the "HERE IS" (popular with Telex or TWX call initiations) and REPT (I can't recall its meaning but, geez, looks like a request to repeat last transmission or indicating that what follows is a repeat transmission).


> What was the "REPT" key used for?

See above.


> I also noticed there wasn't any tilde key. So I looked at some old Unix 
> code and didn't see tilde used for home directory until 1980 csh. But 
> how was tilde entered for previous uses? (Maybe I just overlooked on 
> keyboard.)

I thought the tilde (~) was used in the C language.  I remember seeing tildes as home directories in V7 or certainly in CSH.  Again, my recollections...

> Was there any concept of intra-line editing when using a model-33 -- but 
> without seeing what is being typed or having it print over (and over) 
> same line content? (I should assume that intra-line editing can only 
> happen on video terminals.)

As implied before, I don't recall any intraline editing (beyond backspacing or erasing-the-last-character commands for those "glass tty's" that could support it) until CSH.

> (My book in progress explains a lot about the history of ex/vi but 
> the earliest version I have is 1.1 which included the support for 
> intra-line editing and even visual mode for HP 2645 and LSI ADM-3A 
> cursor-addressible terminals. I am hoping my book can also introduce the 
> basic usage concepts for readers who have no familiarity with the 
> hardware around then. One of the TUHS list participants and termcap/vi 
> developer already told me some about the hjkl arrow keys, for example.)
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
> 

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

Jeremy C. Reed scripsit:

> I guess it was common to use the Teletype Model 33 independently without 
> any video display. 

Yes, it was.  The first video terminal I ever saw was the DEC VT05.

> Did it automatically print to paper everything typed to keyboard in 
> real-time?  Or maybe only when LINE FEED or RE-TURN key was pressed?

No.  It was a full-duplex device, so echoing was normally provided by
the remote system, just like today.

> How would RUB OUT be used when using the sh shell? (I tried looking 
> through the code and manual for some old 32V and previous versions but 
> didn't see code for it yet.)

RUB OUT transmitted the character DEL (0x7F), which was the default
"intr" character (typically ^C today).

> When did the sh shell provide intra-line editing?

With @ and #, from the beginning.

> Were the early Unix versions case insensitive? (Like could I run "DaTe" 
> from shell?) If not, how to get the model-33 to work with it?

The stty settings iuclc and olcuc lowercased input and uppercased output,
and they still work today.  If you tried to log in in all upper case,
login would downcase your username and turn on these settings, a feature
not present today.

> What about the model-33 printer? Did it print lowercase?

No.  IIRC, it printed lower case as upper case, but I may be wrong.

> How was the "HERE IS" key programmed? Was it used in Unix?

I think it was done in the hardware of the teletype.  By default it
sent a string of NUL characters.

> What was the "REPT" key used for?

It was a shift key which, when held down, caused other keys to be
repeated.  The Model 33 did not provide auto-repeating keys.

> I also noticed there wasn't any tilde key. So I looked at some old Unix 
> code and didn't see tilde used for home directory until 1980 csh. But 
> how was tilde entered for previous uses? (Maybe I just overlooked on 
> keyboard.)

None of `, ~, {, |, or } were present on the keyboard.  If there was
a way to type them to Unix, I don't know what it was.

> Was there any concept of intra-line editing when using a model-33 -- but 
> without seeing what is being typed or having it print over (and over) 
> same line content? (I should assume that intra-line editing can only 
> happen on video terminals.)

On DEC OSes, the RUBOUT key echoed as \, and you had to count them to
see what you had, or push ^R to get the line re-echoed cleanly.  The
modern uses of ^R, ^U, ^O, and ^Z on Windows all come from DEC.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
All "isms" should be "wasms".   --Abbie

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Milo Velimirović]

I used v6 on an 11/45 -- my comments refer to my recollections from the mid-late 1970s.

On Aug 6, 2014, at 10:26 AM, Jeremy C. Reed <reed at reedmedia.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:
> 
>>> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
>> 
>> The keyboard could send all of ASCII except lower-case letters, grave,
>> braces, and vertical bar (i.e. excluding x60 to x7E).  The high-order
>> bit was always set.  Using the paper tape reader and punch, you could
>> transmit arbitrary 8-bit characters.
> 
> I guess it was common to use the Teletype Model 33 independently without 
> any video display. (I read that it could accommodate a modem too.) Did 
> it automatically print to paper everything typed to keyboard in 
> real-time?  Or maybe only when LINE FEED or RE-TURN key was pressed?

What video? I don't recall ever seeing a TTY have video displays.
Terminals could operate in either Full Duplex or Half Duplex. The former required every character to be echoed in order to be printed. In HDX mode every character typed was both sent down the wire and printed.

Yes, some TTYs had an attached acoustic coupler and/or a paper tape reader-punch.

> 
> How would RUB OUT be used when using the sh shell? (I tried looking 
> through the code and manual for some old 32V and previous versions but 
> didn't see code for it yet.)

It wasn't really used. Most often rubout was used on systems where a "text" would be prepared offline and punched on paper tape as it was being typed. Hitting rubout would punch holes in all positions on the tape effectively obliterating  whatever had been typed. Once the offline text was complete the tape could be transmitted to a host for further processing. This was the Automatic Send part of the ASR-33. I recall doing this in the early 70s at a community college I went to -- but this wasn't connected to a UNIX system.

> 
> When did the sh shell provide intra-line editing?

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[scj]

While on this thread, I have to share my favorite Model 37 TYY story.

The Model 37 was a mechanical marvel--under the hood it was filled with
levers and cams and all manner of strange mechanisms.  Dennis Ritchie had
one at home long after most of the rest of us had moved on to glass
teletypes.  It mostly worked, although as it aged the mechanical systems
got a bit rickety and had a tendency to insert an extra blank character
into the line you were typing, especially if you were typing fast.

The last straw for Dennis happened late one evening when he was doing the
usual housekeeping after compiling a large program:
    rm *.o
(after all, disc space was very limited in those days) and he got back the
message:
    .o not found

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Mary Ann Horton]

Quoting "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia.net>:


> When did the sh shell provide intra-line editing?

I don't think sh ever did line editing, unless sh is a link to bash or ksh.
I first saw this in csh around 1978, ed-style.  David Korn added EMACS
editing to ksh in the early 80s, and Alan Hewitt wrote a mini-vi version
which Korn also included.  Once I had access to vi in the shell, I switched
from csh to ksh and never went back.

> How was the "HERE IS" key programmed? Was it used in Unix?

HERE IS was intended for two teletypes connected to each other via modem.
There was a short ID string hardcoded somehow into the teletype - I think
the limit was 8 or 16 characters, and if not null, typically was a short
ID of whose teletype it was (e.g. the organization name or site in the org.)
If you press HERE IS, it was as if you had typed those characters.
More interesting was that if one side of the link sent the ASCII ENQ
(enquiry, control E) character, the other side would respond with its
HERE IS string.

You were supposed to type a message offline onto paper tape (editing
with the "back space" button on the tape punch, which rewound the tape
reel one character so the most recent char was ready to be punched again)
and then type RUB OUT, which obliterated the typo.)  Then you would put
the tape in the reader, dial the number of another teletype, and press
Start on the tape reader.  Your tape would read and be transmitted to the
other side.  Sort of a primitive email system, it was widely used by news
media.  There was even a "Telex" network of these things - the Wikipedia
entry for Telex has some background and a few vintage photos.

I think if you put an ENQ at the beginning of your tape, the other side
would identify itself, so you were sure it went to the right place.
Of course, the tape kept reading, so you'd better have several NULL
characters after the ENQ.

I never tried this, my ASR33 days were spent dialing up computers, not
other teletypes.   I actually bought one of these things as a college  
sophomore so I could access the computer center from my dorm room!   
UNIX didn't
use HERE IS.

   Mary Ann

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Mary Ann Horton]

I just discovered that Wikipedia has a nice article "teleprinter" that  
goes into detail about these devices.

About "HERE IS" they state this:
Some teleprinters had a "Here is" key, which transmitted a fixed  
sequence 20 or 22 characters, programmable by breaking tabs off a  
drum. This sequence could also be transmitted automatically upon  
receipt of an ENQ (control E) signal, if enabled.[19][20] This was  
commonly used to identify a station; the operator could press the key  
to send the station identifier to the other end, or the remote station  
could trigger its transmission by sending the ENQ character,  
essentially asking "who are you?".

Quoting Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net>:

> Quoting "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia.net>:
>
>
>> When did the sh shell provide intra-line editing?
>
> I don't think sh ever did line editing, unless sh is a link to bash or ksh.
> I first saw this in csh around 1978, ed-style.  David Korn added EMACS
> editing to ksh in the early 80s, and Alan Hewitt wrote a mini-vi version
> which Korn also included.  Once I had access to vi in the shell, I switched
> from csh to ksh and never went back.
>
>> How was the "HERE IS" key programmed? Was it used in Unix?
>
> HERE IS was intended for two teletypes connected to each other via modem.
> There was a short ID string hardcoded somehow into the teletype - I think
> the limit was 8 or 16 characters, and if not null, typically was a short
> ID of whose teletype it was (e.g. the organization name or site in the org.)
> If you press HERE IS, it was as if you had typed those characters.
> More interesting was that if one side of the link sent the ASCII ENQ
> (enquiry, control E) character, the other side would respond with its
> HERE IS string.
>
> You were supposed to type a message offline onto paper tape (editing
> with the "back space" button on the tape punch, which rewound the tape
> reel one character so the most recent char was ready to be punched again)
> and then type RUB OUT, which obliterated the typo.)  Then you would put
> the tape in the reader, dial the number of another teletype, and press
> Start on the tape reader.  Your tape would read and be transmitted to the
> other side.  Sort of a primitive email system, it was widely used by news
> media.  There was even a "Telex" network of these things - the Wikipedia
> entry for Telex has some background and a few vintage photos.
>
> I think if you put an ENQ at the beginning of your tape, the other side
> would identify itself, so you were sure it went to the right place.
> Of course, the tape kept reading, so you'd better have several NULL
> characters after the ENQ.
>
> I never tried this, my ASR33 days were spent dialing up computers, not
> other teletypes.   I actually bought one of these things as a  
> college sophomore so I could access the computer center from my dorm  
> room!  UNIX didn't
> use HERE IS.
>
>   Mary Ann
>
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[A. P. Garcia]

On Aug 6, 2014 12:54 PM, <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
>
> While on this thread, I have to share my favorite Model 37 TYY story.
>
> The Model 37 was a mechanical marvel--under the hood it was filled with
> levers and cams and all manner of strange mechanisms.  Dennis Ritchie had
> one at home long after most of the rest of us had moved on to glass
> teletypes.  It mostly worked, although as it aged the mechanical systems
> got a bit rickety and had a tendency to insert an extra blank character
> into the line you were typing, especially if you were typing fast.
>
> The last straw for Dennis happened late one evening when he was doing the
> usual housekeeping after compiling a large program:
>     rm *.o
> (after all, disc space was very limited in those days) and he got back the
> message:
>     .o not found

ouch.

Another Model 37 classic:

"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
[ http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/odd.html]
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

>> 
>> When did the sh shell provide intra-line editing?
> 
> I first experienced this with the CSH but maybe there were others before.

If I remember correctly traditionally there were the kill and erase
(#, @) characters, later on Berkeley added thinks like ^W (rub out
last word) and similar stuff.  This was all handle by the terminal
driver in the kernel (saved context switches).  Later people started
to move the edit operations to the CLI applications and libraries
like "readline", the terminal driver runs in cbreak (or whatever
it was called) mode.

	jaap

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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Ronald Natalie]

Cooked mode (or ICANON for later drivers) did the ERASE, KILL, (and later) WERASE.

The later TCSH, KSH, BRL 5R2 version of the (with editing turned on) Bourne Shell, etc... ran the shell in raw (-icanon) mode to do fancier editing including moving the cursor back over already entered text and to insert/delete at the cursor.

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Ronald Natalie]

Actually, I had a Model 37 (ASR) in my house for a while (originally property of Rocky Flats Weapons Center).    It had a big NEWLINE key on it and it's one of the few terminals where you didn't have to turn on cr/nl mapping.    It also dealt with all those ESC-8 and ESC-9 characters and the like that nroff put out by default.   It also put had a big green PROCEED light that came on with DSR or CD on the serial interface.    Mine didn't have the greek type box that you switched in and out with SHIFT IN / SHIFT OUT characters and yes, an unprogrammed HERE IS drum.

One neat feature about the RUBOUT (or DELETE) character is that it was "all ones" in binary.    The way you'd correct errors in off-line generated paper tape was to backspace the punch and then hit rubout.   The input device would subsequently ignore any such characters.

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Ronald Natalie]

At the University of Maryland all the teletypes were given unique "site id's" encoded on the here-is drum.   The UNIVAC port multiplexors would send ENQ to them to get the site id to record in the login sequence on EXEC 8,

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Ronald Natalie]

On Aug 6, 2014, at 3:47 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
>> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
> 
> Nope; it was 5-bit Baudot (technically ITA2).  Upper case only, and there 
> were codes to shift between letters and figures.  Grep thee the net for 
> "ASR33".

Nonsense.   The Model 33 as ASCII but Upper Case only.   It definitely was not Baudot.
The Baudot version of the same thing was a model 28.   

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Mary Ann Horton]

On the model 33 (ASCII) teletype, control G, the BEL character, rang a  
metal bell inside the box, and it went "ding".

I had a friend who came across an older, Baudot teletype (I think he  
said it was a model 27.)  It also had a BEL character.  He said  
instead of going "ding", it went "splat", and a printed character  
appeared on the paper in the shape of a bell!

Quoting Ronald Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com>:

>
> On Aug 6, 2014, at 3:47 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>>
>>> So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
>>
>> Nope; it was 5-bit Baudot (technically ITA2).  Upper case only, and there
>> were codes to shift between letters and figures.  Grep thee the net for
>> "ASR33".
>
> Nonsense.   The Model 33 as ASCII but Upper Case only.   It  
> definitely was not Baudot.
> The Baudot version of the same thing was a model 28.
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>

[TUHS] Baudot/ASCII (was Re: terminal - just for fun)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> > So the model-33 wasn't ASCII?
> 
> Nope; it was 5-bit Baudot (technically ITA2).  Upper case only, and 
> there were codes to shift between letters and figures.  Grep thee the 
> net for "ASR33".

Eek!  For some reason I was thinking of Amateur RTTY (I happen to be an 
Amateur "ham" radio operator).  Computers are mostly used now, with both 
Baudot and ASCII, both FSK and AFSK, but you do see the occasional 
die-hard using a boat-anchor.

-- Dave (vk2kfu)

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[arnold]

John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> arnold at skeeve.com scripsit:
>
> > I think I'd trust the memory of the Bell Labs guys here. The tty driver
> > (and stty(1)) had options for translating LF to CR+LF on output and
> > CR to LF on input.  I've seen mention here and in other places of Model 33
> > too many times to believe that it was really a Model 37.  :-)
>
> That shows that they did have Model 33s, as was confirmed for me in
> private mail.  At first there were only a few Model 37s, but they
> did exist; after nroff, they became more common.

Interesting that they had both - I don't remember hearing about the 37
but that doesn't mean much. :-)

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

arnold at skeeve.com scripsit:

> I think I'd trust the memory of the Bell Labs guys here. The tty driver
> (and stty(1)) had options for translating LF to CR+LF on output and
> CR to LF on input.  I've seen mention here and in other places of Model 33
> too many times to believe that it was really a Model 37.  :-)

That shows that they did have Model 33s, as was confirmed for me in
private mail.  At first there were only a few Model 37s, but they
did exist; after nroff, they became more common.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There are
no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that
they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. --The Hobbit

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[arnold]

John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> The Unix treatment of LF as newline shows, however, that you folks had
> model 37 TTYs; the model 33 still required CR+LF for newline.

I think I'd trust the memory of the Bell Labs guys here. The tty driver
(and stty(1)) had options for translating LF to CR+LF on output and
CR to LF on input.  I've seen mention here and in other places of Model 33
too many times to believe that it was really a Model 37.  :-)

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Diomidis Spinellis]

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On 04/08/2014 23:46, Norman Wilson wrote:
> PS: it's true that the Plan 9 folks at Bell Labs were early
> champions of both Unicode and the UTF-8 encoding.  Source:
> personal memory.

See the paper " Hello World or Καλημέρα κόσμε or こんにちは 世界" by Rob 
Pike & Ken Thompson

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Norman Wilson]

Tim Newsham:

  I was referring to the bell labs guys who wrote linux and later plan9...

=======

Which Bell Labs guys wrote Linux?

I assume you're not referring to Andy Tanenbaum, erstwhile teacher
of a certain famous Finn ...

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

PS: it's true that the Plan 9 folks at Bell Labs were early
champions of both Unicode and the UTF-8 encoding.  Source:
personal memory.

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 4 Aug 2014, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote:

> Related to this is the stty -lcase option that mapped lower case char to 
> upper (or the other way around, I forgot)

Wait until you've used a VT-05 as the console; 72x20, upper case on 
display with few symbols (so Unix showed "{" as "\(" for example), a 
switch that told it to send lower case, and another switch that echoed 
locally (useful for passwords).

And the upper-case printers that overstruck "{" as "(\b-"....  Those poxy 
things were about as Unix-hostile as you could get.

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

On Aug 4, 2014, at 20:04, scj at yaccman.com wrote:

> The model 33 Teletypes that were the most common terminal attached to Unix
> in the early days had only a single case, as I recall, being primarily
> used with paper tape with a character set closely related to the character
> set used on punched cards (although with some features that eventually
> become supported in ASCII).  Unix, however, interpreted the "letters" in
> the character set as lower case by default, which was highly unusual at
> that time, since there were almost no printers or terminals that would
> print upper and lower case.

I vaguely remember the DEC LA 30(?) we had as a console to the
11/45.  It would only print Upper Case.

Related to this is the stty -lcase option that mapped lower case
char to upper (or the other way around, I forgot)

	jaap
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Doug McIlroy]

> Remember that writing programs on terminals was a relative latecomer --
> FORTRAN was designed for punched cards.

Remember that FORTRAN also was a latecomer. It was a shock 
to convert from the full character set of the Flexowriters at
Whirlwind to the rebarbative upper-case-only of the 704.

In that vein, there was a period when the Chicago Manual Style 
disparaged uppercase text, with an exception being made for
computer programs, which of course should be presented in           
upper case.

Doug

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Newsham]

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ack, slip of the keyboard.. no insult intended...

On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Milo Velimirović <milov at cs.uwlax.edu> wrote:
>
> On Aug 4, 2014, at 2:10 PM, Tim Newsham <tim.newsham at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 8:29 AM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>>>> years later those same rabble rousers would force unicode on us :)
>>>
>>> Hah!  Unix had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Unicode age.
>>> Microsoft and Apple were well ahead on internationalization and mostly
>>> still are.
>>
>> I was referring to the bell labs guys who wrote linux and later plan9...
>
> LINUX? surely you jest... or your fingers have a mind of their own.
>
>
>>
>>> John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
>>
>> --
>> Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com
>> _______________________________________________
>> TUHS mailing list
>> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
> --
> Milo Velimirović
> Network Specialist - ITS Network Services
> 608.785.6618 Office -  608.386.2817 Cell
> University of Wisconsin - La Crosse
> La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601 USA   43 48 48 N 91 13 53 W
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Milo Velimirović]

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On Aug 4, 2014, at 2:10 PM, Tim Newsham <tim.newsham at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 8:29 AM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>>> years later those same rabble rousers would force unicode on us :)
>> 
>> Hah!  Unix had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Unicode age.
>> Microsoft and Apple were well ahead on internationalization and mostly
>> still are.
> 
> I was referring to the bell labs guys who wrote linux and later plan9...

LINUX? surely you jest... or your fingers have a mind of their own.


> 
>> John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
> 
> -- 
> Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

--
Milo Velimirović
Network Specialist - ITS Network Services
608.785.6618 Office -  608.386.2817 Cell
University of Wisconsin - La Crosse
La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601 USA   43 48 48 N 91 13 53 W

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Newsham]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 8:29 AM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>> years later those same rabble rousers would force unicode on us :)
>
> Hah!  Unix had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Unicode age.
> Microsoft and Apple were well ahead on internationalization and mostly
> still are.

I was referring to the bell labs guys who wrote linux and later plan9...

> John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org

-- 
Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

Tim Newsham scripsit:

> years later those same rabble rousers would force unicode on us :)

Hah!  Unix had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Unicode age.
Microsoft and Apple were well ahead on internationalization and mostly
still are.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Winter:  MIT, / Keio, INRIA, / Issue lots of Drafts.
So much more to understand! / Might simplicity return?
                (A "tanka", or extended haiku)

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

scj at yaccman.com scripsit:

> capital letters, probably because you could
> get legibility with fewer dots that way and didn't have to worry about
> descenders.

According to legend, Teletype's own legibility studies showed the
opposite, that all lower case was far more legible in the presence poor
light, a weak ribbon, dirty paper, and other noise sourcess, but this was
overridden by management on the grounds that it would make it impossible
to spell "God" correctly.  Untrue, but amusing.

> The model 33 Teletypes that were the most common terminal attached to Unix
> in the early days had only a single case, as I recall, being primarily
> used with paper tape with a character set closely related to the character
> set used on punched cards (although with some features that eventually
> become supported in ASCII).  

The model 33 was released in 1963 and was one of the first devices to use
(the 1963 version of) ASCII.  System/360 was originally supposed to use
it, but the effort to make ASCII-compatible printers and card readers
in time for its release was a failure.

The Unix treatment of LF as newline shows, however, that you folks had
model 37 TTYs; the model 33 still required CR+LF for newline.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies!
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Newsham]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 8:04 AM,  <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> Unix, however, interpreted the "letters" in
> the character set as lower case by default, which was highly
> unusual at that time, since there were almost no printers or
> terminals that would print upper and lower case.

years later those same rabble rousers would force
unicode on us :)

-- 
Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[scj]

Remember that writing programs on terminals was a relative latecomer --
FORTRAN was designed for punched cards.  Their 6-bit character set has
"numbers" and "letters" (no case need apply).  The printers and other
supporting peripherals printed capital letters, probably because you could
get legibility with fewer dots that way and didn't have to worry about
descenders.

At Bell Labs (before Unix days) programmers wrote their programs on coding
sheets and handed them in to a room full of keypunchers.  They would punch
the program up on cards, and then a second person would repeat the process
using a verifier, a piece of hardware that took in a punched card, and had
a keyboard, and would verify that what the person typed in was what had
been punched on the card.  Then the punched and verified deck of cards was
returned to the programmer, who could submit it to the mainframe to run
it.

Although the coding sheet had little tick marks to indicate the column
positions, the keypunchers took advantage of FORTRAN syntax to simply
ignore spaces (they did know enough to respect blanks in Hollerith strings
and to start typing the program in the appropriate column).  Leaving the
blanks out not only made the process go faster, but also reduced the
number of false failures in verification, where the original keypuncher
and verifier disagreed on how many spaces should be inserted.

The model 33 Teletypes that were the most common terminal attached to Unix
in the early days had only a single case, as I recall, being primarily
used with paper tape with a character set closely related to the character
set used on punched cards (although with some features that eventually
become supported in ASCII).  Unix, however, interpreted the "letters" in
the character set as lower case by default, which was highly unusual at
that time, since there were almost no printers or terminals that would
print upper and lower case.


> On Saturday,  2 August 2014 at  4:27:50 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>>
>> On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always?
>
> No.  It was first implemented on the IBM 704, which had a 6 bit BCD
> character set.  No lower case.
>

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> Basically, until the introduction of ASCII, there weren't many systems 
> with lower case.  IBM had lower case characters with EBCDIC, but didn't 
> seem to use them.  I wrote code in FORTRAN and COBOL before the 
> introduction of lower-case, but later compilers I've seen for both 
> languages accepted lower case.

ISTR that the mighty 1403 printer had the "text train" - type TN, if 
memory serves.  It slowed down printing (not as many duplications) but you 
got lower case and a few more symbols.  You quickly learned to never leave 
a cup of coffee on the lid, because it lifted automatically...

> I think the real reason for the retention of upper case in these 
> languages was because it made people feel leet.  "We're computer 
> programmers, we write in upper case".  It's like the disregard for 
> normal punctuation that some style guides require( like putting spaces 
> on the wrong sides of parentheses, or omitting them where required ).

I had a boss once who had this annoying habit of writing "(\ blah\ )" in 
his Nroff documents.

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 August 2014 at  9:04:12 -0500, Milo Velimirovic wrote:
> I've got a PDT11/150 and VT100.
>
> I wonder where the 8" floppies went. Anyone willing to duplicate a
> bootable PDT11 RT11 floppy?

Not really, but I have a couple of drives it you want them.  I gave my
PDP-11 away a couple of years ago.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

Dave Horsfall scripsit:

> Ahh...  RT-11 and TECO...  Who here hasn't typed their name into it to see 
> what it did?

In my case, it's trivial: it jumps to the start of the buffer (J) and then
crashes by trying to go to (O) the label "HN COWAN" and failing.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Where the wombat has walked, it will inevitably walk again.
   (even through brick walls!)

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Milo Velimirovic]

I've got a PDT11/150 and VT100.

I wonder where the 8" floppies went. Anyone willing to duplicate a bootable PDT11  RT11 floppy?

 - Milo

On Aug 2, 2014, at 8:35 AM, Bill Pechter wrote:

> RT11 was my first home system... Got to love those DEC employee purchase PDT11/150's.
> Slow as hell but the OS was miles beyond DOS and CP/M.
> 
> VT180 was next followed by an AT&T 6300 DOS/Xenix box.
> 
> Bo;;
> 
> --
>   d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN.  Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
>  pechter-at-gmail.com
> 
> 
> On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 2:17 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:
> 
> > > Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving
> > > MS-DOS a miss.
> >
> > I was actually thinking about OS/8 and RT-11.
> 
> Ahh...  RT-11 and TECO...  Who here hasn't typed their name into it to see
> what it did?
> 
> I was thinking of home systems.
> 
> -- Dave
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
> 
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Bill Pechter]

RT11 was my first home system... Got to love those DEC employee purchase
PDT11/150's.
Slow as hell but the OS was miles beyond DOS and CP/M.

VT180 was next followed by an AT&T 6300 DOS/Xenix box.

Bo;;

--
  d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN.  Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
 pechter-at-gmail.com


On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 2:17 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:
>
> > > Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving
> > > MS-DOS a miss.
> >
> > I was actually thinking about OS/8 and RT-11.
>
> Ahh...  RT-11 and TECO...  Who here hasn't typed their name into it to see
> what it did?
>
> I was thinking of home systems.
>
> -- Dave
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[random832]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014, at 18:59, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Jul 2014, Tim Newsham wrote:
> 
> > just for fun, you might want to run your
> > ancient unix in simh using this terminal:
> > https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term
> 
> Gadzooks - that takes me back!  Curved screen and everything...

Of course, curved screens aren't that far back compared to the rest -
PCs had them into the early 2000s.

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Nemo]

On 1 August 2014 23:27, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote (in part):
> I've been bitten several times by Mac things which fail horribly because there's a README
> and a ReadMe in a tarball.

As a side note, I run OS X on a case-sensitive fs and had only one
bother when an installation script had mixed case.

N.

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 2 Aug 2014, at 04:45, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> Only in the sense that all file names were upper case, and lower case
> names were upshifted.

Yes, that's what I meant: you could type at it in lowercase and it didn't care, it just translated to uppercase for you.  So you didn't need a caps lock key.

> 
> I think the real reason for the retention of upper case in these
> languages was because it made people feel leet.  "We're computer
> programmers, we write in upper case".  It's like the disregard for
> normal punctuation that some style guides require( like putting spaces
> on the wrong sides of parentheses, or omitting them where required ).

And actually that's the only reason for needing a caps lock key really: for systems which *had* no lowercase, then you wouldn't need a caps lock key because you couldn't *type* lowercase!

As a (possibly now dry) Lisp person, case was a very sensitive issue.  Lisp originated on systems without lowercase (indeed, on the IBM 704, of course, like all good things) and most implementations used uppercase symbols.  Common Lisp is fully case-sensitive (symbols can contain mixed case, and in fact can contain any character known to the implementation), but all the standard symbols are uppercase.  However by default the reader translates lowercase to uppercase for symbol names (not for strings of course), and you can also persuade the printer to *print* symbol names in lowercase except where that would be ambiguous, so the language looks as if it is case-insensitive lowercase-preferred, except it isn't at all.  Very much smoke and flame has been produced about this topic, especially among adherents of some of the more extreme sects (Lisp being more correctly thought of as a religion than a programming language).
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:

> > Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving 
> > MS-DOS a miss.
> 
> I was actually thinking about OS/8 and RT-11.

Ahh...  RT-11 and TECO...  Who here hasn't typed their name into it to see 
what it did?

I was thinking of home systems.

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 August 2014 at 15:45:29 +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
>> While I'm not convinced I agree with John, this would have predated
>> CP/M.  After all it, and MS-DOS after it, *did* understand lower case.
>> And the CapSlock key was there on the earliest upper/lower case
>> keyboards I've seen.
>
> Now you're taking me back to the 2741 and ye olde 360/50...

Heh.  I never used a 2741, just a 735, which I interfaced to a Z-80 in
the early 1980s.  Its native code was neither BCD nor EBCDIC, just two
tilt and 4 (I think) rotate bits that mapped to a position on the
ball.

> The Teletype on the PDP-8 was upper-case, as was the 2741 with the
> APL goofball.

Yes, that was my first machine too, with the cheaper ASR-33 without
lower case.

Does anybody who used the ASR-35 recall if it had a CapsLock key?

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> While I'm not convinced I agree with John, this would have predated 
> CP/M.  After all it, and MS-DOS after it, *did* understand lower case. 
> And the CapSlock key was there on the earliest upper/lower case 
> keyboards I've seen.

Now you're taking me back to the 2741 and ye olde 360/50...

The Teletype on the PDP-8 was upper-case, as was the 2741 with the APL 
goofball.  I never saw a Terminet.

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Warner Losh]

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On Aug 1, 2014, at 9:27 PM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:

> 
> On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a 
>> miss.
> 
> MS-DOS understood lowercase: it just didn't care in the common way.  Did filenames have case at all? I can't remember.  Interestingly, other than minority systems (Unix!) the modern standard for filenames seems to be to remember but not care about case: this is what the Mac does (with the default FS options) and I am pretty sure what Windows does too.  I've been bitten several times by Mac things which fail horribly because there's a README and a ReadMe in a tar ball.

MS-DOS was strictly upper case  (with lower case converted) until Win95 expanded the lengths and case restrictions (but case was preserved, but not significant). Mac followed the same convention, although today it depends on the filesystem options for case being significant or not (for some programs it matters, strangely enough).

> Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always?  I suspect it didn't officially, until Fortran 90, although obviously many F77 compilers accepted lowercase.  More to the point for quite a long time, whether or not the system would accept lowercase, people actually *wrote* un uppercase and caps lock was probably useful for that.  Also COBOL I suspect, and probably SQL?  There was a lot of code written in those languages.

FORTRAN III and IV compilers for the PDP-11 RSX-11 / RSTS-E / RT-11 system accepted lowercase, but in the LST files it produced it always converted to upper case. But the terminals of the time had sensible caps locks keys that weren’t directly to the left of the ‘a’ key… and the few that did had the control key to the left of it rather than relegated to its “modern” place below the shift key...

Warner

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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> MS-DOS understood lowercase: it just didn't care in the common way.  
> Did filenames have case at all? I can't remember.  Interestingly, other 
> than minority systems (Unix!) the modern standard for filenames seems to 
> be to remember but not care about case: this is what the Mac does (with 
> the default FS options) and I am pretty sure what Windows does too.  
> I've been bitten several times by Mac things which fail horribly because 
> there's a README and a ReadMe in a tarball.

One of my irritations was "Makefile" and "makefile"; I could never 
remember which had priority.  I standardised on "Makefile", but oddly
enough "makefile" was/is popular; I prefer my metafiles to stand out.

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 August 2014 at  4:27:50 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>
> On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a
>> miss.
>
> MS-DOS understood lowercase: it just didn't care in the common way.
> Did filenames have case at all?

Only in the sense that all file names were upper case, and lower case
names were upshifted.

> Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always?

No.  It was first implemented on the IBM 704, which had a 6 bit BCD
character set.  No lower case.

> I suspect it didn't officially, until Fortran 90, although obviously
> many F77 compilers accepted lowercase.  More to the point for quite
> a long time, whether or not the system would accept lowercase,
> people actually *wrote* un uppercase and caps lock was probably
> useful for that.  Also COBOL I suspect, and probably SQL?

Basically, until the introduction of ASCII, there weren't many systems
with lower case.  IBM had lower case characters with EBCDIC, but
didn't seem to use them.  I wrote code in FORTRAN and COBOL before the
introduction of lower-case, but later compilers I've seen for both
languages accepted lower case.

I think the real reason for the retention of upper case in these
languages was because it made people feel leet.  "We're computer
programmers, we write in upper case".  It's like the disregard for
normal punctuation that some style guides require( like putting spaces
on the wrong sides of parentheses, or omitting them where required ).

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 August 2014 at 11:49:02 +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:
>
>>> Personally I've yet to think of a single use for Caps Lock and Num
>>> Lock.
>>
>> It was essential in the transition period when keyboards had acquired
>> upper and lower case but operating systems only understood upper case.
>
> Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a
> miss.

While I'm not convinced I agree with John, this would have predated
CP/M.  After all it, and MS-DOS after it, *did* understand lower case.
And the CapSlock key was there on the earliest upper/lower case
keyboards I've seen.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a 
> miss.

MS-DOS understood lowercase: it just didn't care in the common way.  Did filenames have case at all? I can't remember.  Interestingly, other than minority systems (Unix!) the modern standard for filenames seems to be to remember but not care about case: this is what the Mac does (with the default FS options) and I am pretty sure what Windows does too.  I've been bitten several times by Mac things which fail horribly because there's a README and a ReadMe in a tarball.

Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always?  I suspect it didn't officially, until Fortran 90, although obviously many F77 compilers accepted lowercase.  More to the point for quite a long time, whether or not the system would accept lowercase, people actually *wrote* un uppercase and caps lock was probably useful for that.  Also COBOL I suspect, and probably SQL?  There was a lot of code written in those languages.

--tim

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote:

> > Personally I've yet to think of a single use for Caps Lock and Num 
> > Lock.
> 
> It was essential in the transition period when keyboards had acquired 
> upper and lower case but operating systems only understood upper case.

Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a 
miss.

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dario Niedermann]

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Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> The one true key to the left of the ‘a’ key is Control. All other
> keyboards are heretical.

To each their own. As a Vi user, nothing beats having Esc on the
home row.


-- 
Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/     Homepage: http://devio.us/~ndr/

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Warner Losh]

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On Aug 1, 2014, at 3:32 PM, Dario Niedermann <dnied at tiscali.it> wrote:

> Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
>> Personally I've yet to think of a single use for Caps Lock and Num Lock.
>> 
>> Whenever I get stuck with a M$ keyboard (which seems to be most of them) I 
>> prise off a few irritating keys so that I don't hit the poxy things by 
>> mistake.
> 
> CapsLock has its use, it's just that on a typical PC keyboard the key is
> unnecessarily large and easy to reach. But it's simple enough to swap it
> with -say- Esc. I've been doing just that on X11, Linux console and
> OpenBSD console.
> 
> See: X11: xmodmap(1); Linux: loadkeys(1), keymaps(5);
>     OpenBSD: wsconsctl(8)

The one true key to the left of the ‘a’ key is Control. All other keyboards are heretical.

Warner

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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dario Niedermann]

Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> Personally I've yet to think of a single use for Caps Lock and Num Lock.
>
> Whenever I get stuck with a M$ keyboard (which seems to be most of them) I 
> prise off a few irritating keys so that I don't hit the poxy things by 
> mistake.

CapsLock has its use, it's just that on a typical PC keyboard the key is
unnecessarily large and easy to reach. But it's simple enough to swap it
with -say- Esc. I've been doing just that on X11, Linux console and
OpenBSD console.

See: X11: xmodmap(1); Linux: loadkeys(1), keymaps(5);
     OpenBSD: wsconsctl(8)


-- 
Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/     Homepage: http://devio.us/~ndr/

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

Dave Horsfall scripsit:

> Personally I've yet to think of a single use for Caps Lock and Num Lock.

It was essential in the transition period when keyboards had acquired
upper and lower case but operating systems only understood upper case.
Since then it has been nothing but a nuisance.

> Whenever I get stuck with a M$ keyboard (which seems to be most of them) I 
> prise off a few irritating keys so that I don't hit the poxy things by 
> mistake.

The echt-MS keyboard I am using right now under Windows 7 has a driver
that lets me disable Caps Lock, and so I have done.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.  --Bokonon

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote:

> The Sun 5c US/UNIX Keyboard (USB) is widely available and reasonably 
> priced, and many of them have Control and Esc where God put them!

Personally I've yet to think of a single use for Caps Lock and Num Lock.

Whenever I get stuck with a M$ keyboard (which seems to be most of them) I 
prise off a few irritating keys so that I don't hit the poxy things by 
mistake.

Best keyboard I ever used was the PC-101, with the runner-up being the one 
with the function keys down the LHS.  Can't remember the Sun keyboards, 
but they did have some pretty ghastly ones, such as the first one; it was 
so heavy that you could've used it as a lethal weapon.

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Newsham]

coincidentally both keyboard design and music
composition reached their pinnacle during my
formative years.
(... and editors!)

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 7:59 AM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
>
>> I bought a lifetime supply (a pack of 5) on ebay several months ago.
>>
>
> Hehe. ;)
>
>
>> Nobody else can stand to use my keyboard :)
>>
>
> Really? Aside from the extra keys and a couple being in different locations
> I can't imagine anyone having too many issues!
>
>
>> Quoting Milo Velimirovi? <milov at cs.uwlax.edu>:
>>
>>
>>> With a keyboard that has the CTRL key in the location where $DEITY
>>> intended it to be.
>>>
>>> - MV
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> TUHS mailing list
>> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
>
> --
> Cory Smelosky
> http://gewt.net Personal stuff
> http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
>
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs



-- 
Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Cory Smelosky]

On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote:

> I bought a lifetime supply (a pack of 5) on ebay several months ago.
>

Hehe. ;)

> Nobody else can stand to use my keyboard :)
>

Really? Aside from the extra keys and a couple being in different 
locations I can't imagine anyone having too many issues!

> Quoting Milo Velimirovi? <milov at cs.uwlax.edu>:
>
>
>> With a keyboard that has the CTRL key in the location where $DEITY intended 
>> it to be.
>> 
>> - MV
>
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

-- 
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Mary Ann Horton]

Yes!

The Sun 5c US/UNIX Keyboard (USB) is widely available and reasonably  
priced, and many of them have Control and Esc where God put them!

I bought a lifetime supply (a pack of 5) on ebay several months ago.

Nobody else can stand to use my keyboard :)

Quoting Milo Velimirovi? <milov at cs.uwlax.edu>:


> With a keyboard that has the CTRL key in the location where $DEITY  
> intended it to be.
>
>  - MV

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Milo Velimirović]

On Aug 1, 2014, at 10:13 AM, Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Friday, August 1, 2014, Dario Niedermann <dnied at tiscali.it> wrote:
> Tim Newsham <tim.newsham at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > just for fun, you might want to run your
> > ancient unix in simh using this terminal:
> > https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term
> 
> Cool! I've been waiting for ages for something like the Cathode terminal emulator
> to appear on Linux too. Cathode is Mac OS X only, unfortunately.
> Homepage:   http://devio.us/~ndr/
> Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/
> 
> 
> I still prefer my old Digital VT terminal though.  Nothing will beat CRT screen when it comes to low resolution text-only mode.

With a keyboard that has the CTRL key in the location where $DEITY intended it to be.

 - MV

> 
> --Andy 
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Andy Kosela]

On Friday, August 1, 2014, Dario Niedermann <dnied at tiscali.it> wrote:

> Tim Newsham <tim.newsham at gmail.com <javascript:;>> wrote:
>
> > just for fun, you might want to run your
> > ancient unix in simh using this terminal:
> > https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term
>
> Cool! I've been waiting for ages for something like the Cathode terminal
> emulator
> to appear on Linux too. Cathode is Mac OS X only, unfortunately.
> Homepage:   http://devio.us/~ndr/
> Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/
>
>
I still prefer my old Digital VT terminal though.  Nothing will beat CRT
screen when it comes to low resolution text-only mode.

--Andy
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[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dario Niedermann]

Tim Newsham <tim.newsham at gmail.com> wrote:

> just for fun, you might want to run your
> ancient unix in simh using this terminal:
> https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term

Cool! I've been waiting for ages for something like the Cathode terminal emulator
to appear on Linux too. Cathode is Mac OS X only, unfortunately.
Homepage:   http://devio.us/~ndr/
Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2014, Tim Newsham wrote:

> just for fun, you might want to run your
> ancient unix in simh using this terminal:
> https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term

Gadzooks - that takes me back!  Curved screen and everything...

-- Dave

[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Newsham]

just for fun, you might want to run your
ancient unix in simh using this terminal:
https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term

-- 
Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com