[TUHS] re: Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[TUHS] re: Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[Dennis Ritchie]

Norman Wilson recalled

 >  22. Pike, R. "The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal". _AT&T Bell
 >  Laboratories Technical Journal 63_, 8 (Oct. 1984).

 > Rob described an earlier version of the Blit work in a USENIX talk
 > at USENIX in January 1982 (Santa Monica CA).  So far as I know it
 > was just a talk, no paper, though he showed a canned demo on video
 > tape.

By coincidence, one of the two videos made about early Blit
work is newly available in .mpg format: look near the
bottom of Rob Pike's page under Movies:

  http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/index.html

This was just now done by Gerard Holzmann.

Be aware that it is 43MB in size.

This version is spoken by actors, although the script
is Rob's.

The other Blit video is in Betacam format, and we don't
currently have a player for it, so it's not digitized.
I think it's silent, and presumably Rob talked during its
showing.  This might be what accompanied the Usenix talk.

(By the way, there are two other, twice-as large
videos there: the Labscam tape, and Rob's appearance
on the David Letterman TV show with Penn and Teller.)

	Dennis

Blit, was: Re: [TUHS] re: Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[emanuel stiebler]

Is there still enough information available (schematics, manuals, ...)
so an emulator could be written for it ?

cheers

Dennis Ritchie wrote:
> 
> Norman Wilson recalled
> 
>  >  22. Pike, R. "The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal". _AT&T Bell
>  >  Laboratories Technical Journal 63_, 8 (Oct. 1984).
> 
>  > Rob described an earlier version of the Blit work in a USENIX talk
>  > at USENIX in January 1982 (Santa Monica CA).  So far as I know it
>  > was just a talk, no paper, though he showed a canned demo on video
>  > tape.
> 
> By coincidence, one of the two videos made about early Blit
> work is newly available in .mpg format: look near the
> bottom of Rob Pike's page under Movies:
> 
>   http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/index.html
> 
> This was just now done by Gerard Holzmann.
>

[TUHS] re: Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[Mike Haertel]

 >  22. Pike, R. "The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal". _AT&T Bell
 >  Laboratories Technical Journal 63_, 8 (Oct. 1984).

The thing I miss most about the 5620 is Cargill's wonderful little
debugger "pi".  Does anyone know if it was ever ported to X, and
if so, is the source available?

I remain amazed that nobody at Bell Labs ever ported it to Plan 9,
although I suppose both the use of C++ and the completely new symbol
table format in Plan 9 executables would make that a challenge.