31 Jan
2023
31 Jan
'23
3:51 p.m.
Ron Natalie wrote:
The Berkeley job control was an interesting hack.
Just to add some historical context, Berkeley job control was added by
James Kulp. He had previously used ITS and copied those features pretty
much as-is: ^Z does the same thing; bg and fg are named differently but
work the same.
A lot of this dates back from the old “tty” days (or
at least crt
terminals that were still alphanumeric). Even the concept of putting
a job in the background with & is really a feature of trying to
multiplex multiple tasks on the same dumb terminal.
Indeed ITS got started in 1967 with users interacting through teletypes.
Later CRT terminals were added, but the terse user interface persisted.