AIX 3 had virtual consoles back in the early 1980s. The Mathnet crowd at IBM Research (my gang) sort of hated them, though not as much as SMIT and the ODM, because they were implemented at too low a level and didn’t provide any real way for window managers to leverage their facilities.
On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 4:13 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <
tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
Thinking a bit more about terminal multiplexing was a major use case for early X, I recalled using Linux virtual consoles in the late 90’s for this purpose.
According to Wikipedia, virtual consoles originated with Xenix and before that with concurrent CP/M.
Perusing the documentation of those on Bitsavers, I can see that virtual consoles have a prominent mention in the manual for concurrent CP/M (1983), but not those of its forerunners MP/M II and MP/M (1979). I cannot find a mention of virtual consoles in Xenix documentation as late as 1988.
No such thing as a virtual (as distinct from pseudo) tty on 16-bit Unix or early 32-bit, as far as I know; one could argue it does not make much sense with physical terminals. Wikipedia says no such thing existed on SunOS either.
I think virtual consoles where present in Linux from a very early point.
So, as far as I can tell virtual consoles were invented for concurrent CP/M around 1983, made their way to Xenix in the late 80’s and became part of Linux in the early 90’s.
Have I missed other prior art?