12 Jun
2019
12 Jun
'19
12:05 a.m.
Most of what was produced internally to AT&T had to stay there, because
lawyers.
I was at Bell Labs by the time I changed termcap/termlib and the Arnold
curses into "The New Curses and Terminfo", which I presented at Usenix
in Boston 1982. Terminfo was "compiled", and Curses had a new algorithm
to use insert/delete line/char to avoid having to redraw the whole screen.
I wasn't allowed to distribute it outside AT&T. Pavel Curtis of CMU
stepped up and, at my encouragement, volunteered to rewrite it to the
same spec. I worked with him on the spec and the algorithm, and his
version was available to open source.
If you were at the Boston conference, you may recall my presentation. My
Director, Tony Cuilwik, was in the audience, and this was my first
public talk since joining Bell Labs, so I was nervous. As I was stepping
to the podium to begin my talk, Armando Stettner interrupted to present
me with the "Flying Rubber Chicken Award". Someone offstage threw him a
rubber chicken. The chicken was quickly vanished and replaced with the
real award, "The Term Cap". Armando explained that the hat was an Bell
System hard hat, donated by Ken Thompson himself. Scotched to the hat
were "hacker eyes" (googly eye glasses) and a Steve Martin style
arrow-through-the-head "for the term info to go in and come out". He
left me there, holding the award, as I had to reboot my brain to begin
my talk.
I still have that award. It graced my workplace for many years. When I
worked at Bank One in Columbus, I put it on a styrofoam head on top of
my cube. A coworker had contributed a yellow cheerleader pompom which
gave her hair. When Chase bought Bank One, there were Chase big shots
coming through our building, I was told to take it down because it
didn't look "professional". I was offended - "that's an
award!" It
stayed down for several months, and people complained because, in that
cube farm of identical rows of cubes, "people used that for navigation".
I made a little plaque explaining the award and placed it next to the
restored Term Cap on my cube. The award sat on my cube at SDG&E for 11
years without incident, and now that I'm retired I proudly display it on
my piano at home.
Mary Ann
On 6/11/19 10:26 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
Interesting and that sounds quite plausible. CCA
sold it at one
point. Masscomp (because Steve was working for us) got a license and a
redistribution license. IIRC: we could redistribute the binary for
free as long as CCA got Steve's changes back.
Steve definitely did the terminfo/lib work for CCA Emacs at Masscomp,
as I had pointed out that AT&T was moving to terminfo but was locking
it up inside of the System V (AT&T 'consider it standard' stuff - much
to a number of their own people telling them not too). Pavel ??
Curtis I think ?? - I've forgotten his last name - had written a new
uncontaminated version at Cornell that was a functional replacement
and that could read the AT&T ASCII database and compile them
properly. (I don't remember if Pavel's version could take the AT&T
binary versions). I had obtained Pavel's version and we were shipping
that as our terminfo/lib implementation on the Masscomp boxes and were
switching our code to use it, as we had not yet signed a System V
license and were shipping on a System III based one. Steve started
to include Pavel's library in the CCA version, which he got from me.
ᐧ
On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 1:12 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org
<mailto:lars@nocrew.org>> wrote:
Clem Cole wrote:
1.) Zimmerman EMACS (a.k.a. CCA EMACS) ran on the
PDP-11 originally
when Steve wrote it at MIT.
I have this on the origin of Montgomery and Zimmerman Emacs:
"[Montgomery's] emacs implementation was begun in 1979, after having
left MIT. I made it freely available to people INSIDE of Bell Labs,
and it was widely used. It was never officially "released" from Bell
Labs."
"Unfortunately, several copies did get out during that time, mainly
due to people who left Bell Labs to return to school or gave
copies to
friends. When Zimmerman modified one of those copies as the
original
basis for CCA emacs, AT&T and CCA had a prolonged debate over it.
Eventually the matter was resolved when Zimmerman replaced the
last of
my code"
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/blob/sources/Usenet/net.emac…