Re: [TUHS] Blit source

[Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>]

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The Gnot had a 68040 (which had an MMU that paged properly) and an INCON
interface, which was a kind of Datakit for the home. Twisted pair. Half a
megabit if I remember right, but I probably don't.

Two bits per pixel. The "render extension" in X Windows originated there,
after an epiphany I had while watching Hoop Dreams. True story.

The MIPS machine you refer to was called a Magnum, made by somebody for
Microsoft as a porting engine for Windows to non-Intel.

-rob


On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 4:13 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 7:27 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>>
> The sequence is thus Jerq, Blit, DMD-5620. DMD stood for dot-mapped rather
>> than bit-mapped, but I never understood why. It seemed a category error to
>> me.
>>
>
> The first time I saw a terminal of that lineage, it was a gnot (Gnot?
> GNOT?) running Plan 9; this would likely have been 1993 or 1994; I was in
> high school and visited a college-student friend of mine who was interning
> at the labs and Dennis Ritchie had one on his desk. As an aside, he kindly
> spared me a few minutes; I confess I was too star-struck and embarrassed to
> ask him to autograph my copy of K&R that I had brought along. Dennis was a
> kind, humble person and I was always quite struck by that in comparison to
> some other academic and industry super-stars I've met.
>
> Anyway, my question is what was the evolutionary story of the gnot? I
> recall being told that it had a 68020, a datakit interface, and some amount
> of RAM that was small but non-trivial; perhaps 4MB? It seemed clearly
> evolved from the series of earlier terminals presently under discussion.
>
> And the next step in the evolution was a MIPS-based terminal; I can't
> recall the name, though.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>

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