24 May
2018
24 May
'18
9:01 p.m.
below...
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 7:50 AM, Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
Another related creeping featurism was the integration of the control-T
feature that was prevalent in many of the DEC 10/20 OSs.
Yeah I still sometimes missed that hack. Zimmerman (of EMACS fame) put it
into the Masscomp tty handler. He may have had it in an MIT system. That
was the best UNIX version I ever used.
That said, with a window manager on my modern Mac, I just leave 'Activity
Monitor' running, so I don't need it like I did when we ran on glass ttys.
Actually, my favorite Control-T story is not from UNIX, but from TwinEx.
When you typed Control-T on that system, it would reply with '*running,
load average, ...mumble stats, more mumble and more stats*.' In the late
1970s, Stanford had a DEC System-20 called 'LOTS' which they bought for the
undergrads for teaching. Somebody (who will be left nameless) modified
the OS so the 'running' part changed depending on value of the load
average. * i.e.* running, jogging, walking, crawling. But the
administration made them remove the hack when it came back as 'dying' most
of the time.
Clem
ᐧ