[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Joseph Holsten]

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[segaloco via TUHS]

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Nothing says a PDP-11 has to be in a rack with peripherals right? If one could devise up emulated peripherals that plug into the backplane or otherwise tear them down to fit in much less space, a PDP-11 could probably be made to inhabit similar desk real-estate as a workstation, especially some of the smaller LSI models. There's also the MicroVAXen but the SUN-1 beats those to the market.

All in all, I would wager workstation has never been a well regulated term and, especially once PCs and other micros got better, the delineation between a workstation and a consumer PC has just gotten blurrier and blurrier. For instance, I would use the term workstation to apply to my Raspberry Pi, someone else would probably chuckle at the thought while sitting at their modern POWER9 system. It fits all the needs of my non-day-job computing, so workstation enough for me.

- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com> wrote:

> It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
>
> * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the “it depends” edge cases?
> * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
>
> --
> Joseph Holsten
> [http://josephholsten.com](http://josephholsten.com/)
>
> mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
>
> tel:[+1-360-927-7234](tel:(360)%20927-7234)

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Luther Johnson]

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I think what made 'workstations' different was:

1) You had your own computer, you were not just using a terminal 
connected to a computer, that was time-shared with a bunch of other users

2) A very capable large bit-mapped display, hence the variation on this 
term, "graphic workstation"

3) Networking to shared filesystems - in time sharing, you're all on one 
computer, going to the same files on the same disk(s), in a network of 
workstations, you're all going to a network with filesystems mounted on 
disks on machines all over the network. Some workstations had disks and 
filesystems, some did not - hence another variation, "disk-less 
workstation", which booted from the network. "Servers" were big machines 
with big disks, really the same kinds of machines, basically, but 
configured to be effective at hosting resources and people were 
discouraged from logging in and camping out on them.

That's how I remember it, the machines and capabilities were also 
accompanied by the different modes of resource use that they enabled.

On 01/25/2023 05:51 PM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> Nothing says a PDP-11 has to be in a rack with peripherals right? If 
> one could devise up emulated peripherals that plug into the backplane 
> or otherwise tear them down to fit in much less space, a PDP-11 could 
> probably be made to inhabit similar desk real-estate as a workstation, 
> especially some of the smaller LSI models. There's also the MicroVAXen 
> but the SUN-1 beats those to the market.
>
> All in all, I would wager workstation has never been a well regulated 
> term and, especially once PCs and other micros got better, the 
> delineation between a workstation and a consumer PC has just gotten 
> blurrier and blurrier. For instance, I would use the term workstation 
> to apply to my Raspberry Pi, someone else would probably chuckle at 
> the thought while sitting at their modern POWER9 system. It fits all 
> the needs of my non-day-job computing, so workstation enough for me.
>
> - Matt G.
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten 
> <joseph@josephholsten.com> wrote:
>
>> It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall 
>> of the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative 
>> about workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
>>
>> * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are 
>> the “it depends” edge cases?
>> * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or 
>> industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
>> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had 
>> a PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a 
>> workstation? Is it the integration of display into the system that 
>> differentiates?
>>
>> --
>> Joseph Holsten
>> http://josephholsten.com <http://josephholsten.com/>
>> mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com <mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com>
>> tel:+1-360-927-7234 <tel:%28360%29%20927-7234>
>


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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Jon Steinhart]

Luther Johnson writes:
> I think what made 'workstations' different was:
> 
> 1) You had your own computer, you were not just using a terminal connected to a
> computer, that was time-shared with a bunch of other users

While it wasn't UNIX but a stupidly lost market opportunity
the Tektronix 4051 was one of the first workstations.

[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Larry Stewart]

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Marc Donner]

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PERQ

There was some talk of making Unix run on it, but POS (PERQ-OS) was written
in Pascal and there was no reasonable way to port over all of the existing
stuff without rewriting it all.  I had a PERQ in my office for a while … it
put out so much heat and noise that my officemates lobbied to have me
evicted.

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:01 PM Larry Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> wrote:

> There was quite a lot of early activity of course!
> Essentially all of computer science academia was aware of the Xerox Alto,
> although it wasn't a commercial product and wasn't Unix.
>
> Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
> the "3M" workstation.  One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
> Pixels.
>
> One of the early commercial attempts was the Three Rivers PERC (or PERQ?)
> from the Pittsburgh startup.  There were Unix adjacent systems as well,
> such as Apollo Domain.
>
> Of course then Sun got started, and MIPS, and the IBM RT and VaxStations
> so by the mid '80s it was quite crowded.
>
> There is a whole other arc about the graphics workstations, with SGI,
> Ardent, Stellar, Stardent, and so on.
>
> Also, before graphics became affordable, there were various clustered
> character generator based systems like Convergent Technologies.
>
> -L
>
> On Jan 25, 2023, at 7:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>
> wrote:
>
> It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of
> the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
> workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
>
>
> * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
> “it depends” edge cases?
> * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
> industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
>
> --
> Joseph Holsten
> http://josephholsten.com
> mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
> tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
>
> --
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[arnold]

We had some at Georgia Tech when I was in grad school. The Accent OS for it
from CMU (I think) had a lot of ideas and techniques that showed up
later in Mach.  I once referred to Mach as "Accent running on a vax".

IIRC they had portrait shaped fairly large monochrome bitmapped displays.
But I may be misremembering.

At the time I felt like anything that wasn't Unix / written in C
wasn't worth messing with.

Arnold

Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:

> PERQ
>
> There was some talk of making Unix run on it, but POS (PERQ-OS) was written
> in Pascal and there was no reasonable way to port over all of the existing
> stuff without rewriting it all.  I had a PERQ in my office for a while … it
> put out so much heat and noise that my officemates lobbied to have me
> evicted.
>
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:01 PM Larry Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> wrote:
>
> > There was quite a lot of early activity of course!
> > Essentially all of computer science academia was aware of the Xerox Alto,
> > although it wasn't a commercial product and wasn't Unix.
> >
> > Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
> > the "3M" workstation.  One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
> > Pixels.
> >
> > One of the early commercial attempts was the Three Rivers PERC (or PERQ?)
> > from the Pittsburgh startup.  There were Unix adjacent systems as well,
> > such as Apollo Domain.
> >
> > Of course then Sun got started, and MIPS, and the IBM RT and VaxStations
> > so by the mid '80s it was quite crowded.
> >
> > There is a whole other arc about the graphics workstations, with SGI,
> > Ardent, Stellar, Stardent, and so on.
> >
> > Also, before graphics became affordable, there were various clustered
> > character generator based systems like Convergent Technologies.
> >
> > -L
> >
> > On Jan 25, 2023, at 7:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of
> > the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
> > workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
> >
> >
> > * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
> > “it depends” edge cases?
> > * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
> > industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
> > * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> > PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> > the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
> >
> > --
> > Joseph Holsten
> > http://josephholsten.com
> > mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
> > tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
> >
> > --
> =====
> nygeek.net
> mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>

[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Mary Ann Horton]

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On 1/25/23 17:01, Larry Stewart wrote:
> Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea 
> of the "3M" workstation.  One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One 
> Million Pixels.
The way I heard it, a workstation needed to have Menus, a Mouse, and a 1 
MIPS processor. It also had a megabyte of RAM, at least a megabit LAN, a 
megapixel of display, and cost about a megapenny.

Thanks,

/Mary Ann Horton/ (she/her/ma'am)
maryannhorton.com <https://maryannhorton.com>

"This is a great book" - Monica Helms

"Brave and Important" - Laura L. Engel

       Available on Amazon and bn.com!

	<https://www.amazon.com/Trailblazer-Lighting-Transgender-Equality-Corporate-ebook/dp/B0B8F2BR9B>




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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Marc Donner]

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I was a grad student at CMU at the time.  Raj Reddy told me back then that
it was 1 MIPS, 1 million pixels, 1 megabyte of RAM.

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 21:04 Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> On 1/25/23 17:01, Larry Stewart wrote:
>
> Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
> the "3M" workstation.  One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
> Pixels.
>
> The way I heard it, a workstation needed to have Menus, a Mouse, and a 1
> MIPS processor. It also had a megabyte of RAM, at least a megabit LAN, a
> megapixel of display, and cost about a megapenny.
>
> Thanks,
>
>       *Mary Ann Horton* (she/her/ma'am)
>       maryannhorton.com
>
> "This is a great book" - Monica Helms
>
> "Brave and Important" - Laura L. Engel
>
>       Available on Amazon and bn.com!
>
> <https://www.amazon.com/Trailblazer-Lighting-Transgender-Equality-Corporate-ebook/dp/B0B8F2BR9B>
>
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Tom Lyon]

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I believe the term "workstation" came from the integrated interactive
engineering design terminals/systems.  Can't remember details, but
companies like ComputerVision had had them before UNIX and 68000 were a
thing,

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 7:31 PM Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>
wrote:

> It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of
> the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
> workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
>
> * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
> “it depends” edge cases?
> * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
> industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
>
> --
> Joseph Holsten
> http://josephholsten.com
> mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
> tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Chris Hanson]

On Jan 25, 2023, at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com> wrote:
> 
> It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
> 
> * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the “it depends” edge cases?

Nope, Apollo and the Three Rivers PERQ both predate Sun. And while one can certainly question PERQ's commercial success I don't think one can question Apollo's—they were done in by HP's purchase, not by market forces.

Apollo Aegis wasn't actually UNIX, but was very UNIX-like since it was designed by people who had worked at Prime on PrimOS and on MULTICS before that. And later releases provided more specifically UNIX-style environments for users as an alternative to Aegis.

The Three Rivers PERQ had several different environments available, including multiple UNIX implementations.

> * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?

They mostly looked like the Xerox Alto, once it made waves in the research community.

> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it the integration of display into the system that differentiates? 

I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it. Note that I wouldn't necessarily require a workstation to be primarily used by a single user; lots of 1970s CAD systems supported multiple user workstations on a single computer.

  -- Chris

[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[John Cowan]

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On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:47 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net>
wrote:


> > * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
>
> I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use
> in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at
> home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it.
>

WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out
in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.  I had never heard of it before. The
first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably the IBM 1620 (aka
the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try") from 1959.

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Thu, 26 Jan 2023, John Cowan wrote:

> WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came 
> out in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.  I had never heard of it 
> before. The first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably 
> the IBM 1620 (aka the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try") from 
> 1959.

Mmm...  Would a GT-40 connected to a PDP-11/40 count as a workstation?  I 
started using that around 1975 (along with serial terminals, of course), 
in my first job at Uni of NSW (after graduating from there).

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[John Foust via TUHS]

At 01:20 AM 1/26/2023, John Cowan wrote:
>WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.  I had never heard of it before. 

I have a dozen or so Teraks (a PDP-11/03 based system) as well as 
many floppies and other inherited items and notebooks from one 
of the Terak founders.  This may seem like a lot but there's another 
guy who might still have a larger collection.

Mini-Unix is described here:

http://www.tavi.co.uk/unixhistory/mini-unix.html

Sixth edition, no MMU.  The Bell memo there is dated January 1977.  

There was a Mini-Unix for the Terak described here in May 1979 but 
I don't think I have a copy.  See page 14...  

https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/159028/UCC_Special%20_Issue_May_1979.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Terak floppies are described here:  

http://www.60bits.net/msu/mycomp/terak/termedia.htm

A memo there says they got their copy in April 1980.

There's no indication that this Mini-Unix can *use* the Terak's mono 
bitmapped display, short of writing your own routines.  Pinning "first"
on computers is always a tricky process.

- John

[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Jon Forrest]

On 1/25/2023 11:20 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came 
> out in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.  

It also ran standard RT-11. UC Santa Barbara had a room full of them
that I used to (badly) teach PDP-11 assembler in the early 1980s.
Each student had their own 8" floppy disk which held the OS and
enough utilities to edit and debug programs.

Jon

[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Jon Steinhart]

John Cowan writes:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:47 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net>
> wrote:
>
>
> > > * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> > PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> > the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
> >
> > I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use
> > in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at
> > home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it.
> >
>
> WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out
> in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.  I had never heard of it before. The
> first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably the IBM 1620 (aka
> the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try") from 1959.

I think that WP is not correct here, the Tektronix 4051 beat it to market
by a year.

[TUHS] Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Joseph Holsten]

I love how I can fire off a query and get so much info. But I wonder: does TUHS have any way of consolidating these threads into easily digestible documents? What would be preferred, a wiki? or a source control repo with “articles”?

I’m mostly wanting summarize this kind of thread and include links to mailing list messages and other resources.
But also, I’m lazy and I am not committing to editing a journal.

On Thu, Jan 26, 2023, at 10:04, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> John Cowan writes:
>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:47 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> > > * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
>> > PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
>> > the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
>> >
>> > I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use
>> > in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at
>> > home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it.
>> >
>>
>> WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out
>> in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.  I had never heard of it before. The
>> first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably the IBM 1620 (aka
>> the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try") from 1959.
>
> I think that WP is not correct here, the Tektronix 4051 beat it to market
> by a year.

[TUHS] Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Jon Steinhart]

Joseph Holsten writes:
> I love how I can fire off a query and get so much info. But I wonder: does
> TUHS have any way of consolidating these threads into easily digestible
> documents? What would be preferred, a wiki? or a source control repo with
> “articles”?
>
> I’m mostly wanting summarize this kind of thread and include links to
> mailing list messages and other resources.  But also, I’m lazy and I am
> not committing to editing a journal.

Seems like you already know the answer and just don't like it.
The only way to get coheret articles is to write the.  Wikis
suck for this sort of thing.

An appropriate way for us to do this sort of thing would be to create
a repository where we can contribute to documents written in troff.

Jon

[TUHS] Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Joseph Holsten]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2023, at 13:38, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Joseph Holsten writes:
>> I love how I can fire off a query and get so much info. But I wonder: does
>> TUHS have any way of consolidating these threads into easily digestible
>> documents? What would be preferred, a wiki? or a source control repo with
>> “articles”?
>>
>> I’m mostly wanting summarize this kind of thread and include links to
>> mailing list messages and other resources.  But also, I’m lazy and I am
>> not committing to editing a journal.
>
> Seems like you already know the answer and just don't like it.
> The only way to get coheret articles is to write the.  Wikis
> suck for this sort of thing.
>
> An appropriate way for us to do this sort of thing would be to create
> a repository where we can contribute to documents written in troff.

Ah, I meant to ask: is there an existing wiki or repository? Or am I starting one?

And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to knock my rust off.

[TUHS] Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[segaloco via TUHS]

> Ah, I meant to ask: is there an existing wiki or repository? Or am I starting one?

https://wiki.tuhs.org/

I've discussed writing a few articles with Warren and it sounds like he's all for more folks producing content.  Ultimately it's Warren's call on that one, but I'm very interested in starting to produce some content.

> An appropriate way for us to do this sort of thing would be to create
> a repository where we can contribute to documents written in troff.

I've considered this exact thing save not for this project, but just as a way to approach collaborative writing.  I wouldn't have the attention span to admin such a repository, but would more than happily contribute to one, I love exposition and free access to knowledge.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi Joseph,

At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
> And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for
> articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
> in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
> knock my rust off.

There's always ms.  It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort.  Here's a
manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms.  It's
gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[segaloco via TUHS]

You just got my head all abuzz on whether a *roff<->MediaWiki transpiler would be: 1. Possible and 2. Beneficial.

We use a MediaWiki at work for aggregating random tidbits from people that they think might get lost in project noise.  There's times I'd love to have some way to *roff-ize the materials for white papers, the printouts from MediaWiki are uuuuugly.  Benefits on the flip-side would be rapidly getting all sorts of documentation into Wiki format pretty quickly.

Of course, for an actual documentation project, there would need to be a master as diverse edits in different places wouldn't track with one another.  In this case, the *roff sources would probably make a better master for diff reasons.

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 26th, 2023 at 4:36 PM, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:


> Hi Joseph,
> 
> At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
> 
> > And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for
> > articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
> > in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
> > knock my rust off.
> 
> 
> There's always ms. It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
> authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort. Here's a
> manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms. It's
> gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.
> 
> Regards,
> Branden

[TUHS] Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[David Arnold]

fwiw, Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) claims to be able to translate between MediaWiki and both man and ms roff macros. 




d


> On 27 Jan 2023, at 11:54, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> You just got my head all abuzz on whether a *roff<->MediaWiki transpiler would be: 1. Possible and 2. Beneficial.
> 
> We use a MediaWiki at work for aggregating random tidbits from people that they think might get lost in project noise.  There's times I'd love to have some way to *roff-ize the materials for white papers, the printouts from MediaWiki are uuuuugly.  Benefits on the flip-side would be rapidly getting all sorts of documentation into Wiki format pretty quickly.
> 
> Of course, for an actual documentation project, there would need to be a master as diverse edits in different places wouldn't track with one another.  In this case, the *roff sources would probably make a better master for diff reasons.
> 
> - Matt G.
> 
> ------- Original Message -------
>> On Thursday, January 26th, 2023 at 4:36 PM, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Joseph,
>> At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
>>> And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for
>>> articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
>>> in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
>>> knock my rust off.
>> There's always ms. It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
>> authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort. Here's a
>> manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms. It's
>> gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.
>> Regards,
>> Branden

[TUHS] Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Warner Losh]

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I've moved to markdown or asciidoc for things like this. So many things can
import them and they are easier to write than roff or TeX.

Warner

On Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:29 PM David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:

> fwiw, Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) claims to be able to translate between
> MediaWiki and both man and ms roff macros.
>
>
>
>
> d
>
>
> > On 27 Jan 2023, at 11:54, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >
> > You just got my head all abuzz on whether a *roff<->MediaWiki
> transpiler would be: 1. Possible and 2. Beneficial.
> >
> > We use a MediaWiki at work for aggregating random tidbits from people
> that they think might get lost in project noise.  There's times I'd love to
> have some way to *roff-ize the materials for white papers, the printouts
> from MediaWiki are uuuuugly.  Benefits on the flip-side would be rapidly
> getting all sorts of documentation into Wiki format pretty quickly.
> >
> > Of course, for an actual documentation project, there would need to be a
> master as diverse edits in different places wouldn't track with one
> another.  In this case, the *roff sources would probably make a better
> master for diff reasons.
> >
> > - Matt G.
> >
> > ------- Original Message -------
> >> On Thursday, January 26th, 2023 at 4:36 PM, G. Branden Robinson <
> g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi Joseph,
> >> At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
> >>> And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for
> >>> articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
> >>> in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
> >>> knock my rust off.
> >> There's always ms. It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
> >> authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort. Here's a
> >> manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms. It's
> >> gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.
> >> Regards,
> >> Branden
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[emanuel stiebler]

On 2023-01-25 19:31, Joseph Holsten wrote:

> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a 
> PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is 
> it the integration of display into the system that differentiates?

I remember people calling something a workstation,
if it has the four "M"

at least 1 MByte memory
at least 1 megapixel display
at least 1 mbit/s network
can't remember the fourth(was there a fourth?)

[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Rob Pike]

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at least 1 million words of marketing?

-rob


On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 8:54 PM emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:

> On 2023-01-25 19:31, Joseph Holsten wrote:
>
> > * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> > PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is
> > it the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
>
> I remember people calling something a workstation,
> if it has the four "M"
>
> at least 1 MByte memory
> at least 1 megapixel display
> at least 1 mbit/s network
> can't remember the fourth(was there a fourth?)
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Jaap Akkerhuis via TUHS]

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> can't remember the fourth(was there a fourth?)

Mips


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[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Clem Cole]

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Check out: Magnolia - The Tektronix Unix Personal Computer September 1980
<https://streaklinks.com/BXrcuEsysvYb2V7QEQCkESzw/https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2Fbitsavers_tektronixmliaplan_4739361>
This redates - Sun or Apollo, but not the Perq - a.k.a. the 'Pascalto'

Magonila was done in Tek Labs and it eventually birthed Tek
Workstation Division which was a complete failure, although did Tek
eventually commercialized the Magnolia as the Tek 4404 -- a Smalltalk
system (which you can so a web search).  One of the Busines Schools (HBS I
think) wrote a study about it called 'Why Skunks Don't Work."
ᐧ

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 7:32 PM Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>
wrote:

> It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of
> the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
> workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
>
> * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
> “it depends” edge cases?
> * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
> industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
>
> --
> Joseph Holsten
> http://josephholsten.com
> mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
> tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
>

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[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Paul Ruizendaal]

As a result of the recent discussion on this list I’m trying to understand the timeline of graphical computing on Unix, first of all in my preferred time slot ’75 -’85.

When it comes to Bell Labs I’m aware of the following:

- around 1975 the Labs worked on the Glance-G vector graphics terminal. This was TSS-516 based with no Unix overlap I think.
- around the same time the Labs seem to have used the 1973 Dec VT11 vector graphics terminal; at least the surviving LSX Unix source has a driver for it
- in 1976 there was the Terak 8510; this ran primarily USCD pascal, but it also ran LSX and/or MX (but maybe only much later)
- then it seems to jump 1981 and to the Blit.
- in 1984 there was MGR that was done at Bellcore

Outside of the labs (but on Unix), I have:

- I am not sure what graphics software ran on the SUN-1, but it must have been something
- Clem just mentioned the 1981 Tektronix Magnolia system
- Wikipedia says that X1 was 1984 and X11 was 1987; I’m not sure when it became Unix centered
- Sun’s NeWS arrived only in 1989, I think?

Outside of Unix, in the microcomputer world there was a lot of cheap(er) graphics hardware. Lot’s of stuff at 256 x 192 resolution, but up to 512 x 512 at the higher end. John Walker writes that the breakout product for Autodesk was Interact (the precursor to AutoCAD). Initially developed for S-100 bus systems it quickly moved to the PC. There was a lot of demand for CAD at a 5K price point that did not exist at a 50K price point.