19 Dec
2019
19 Dec
'19
11:12 a.m.
On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 7:27 PM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
The sequence is thus Jerq, Blit, DMD-5620. DMD stood for dot-mapped rather
than bit-mapped, but I never understood why. It seemed
a category error to
me.
The first time I saw a terminal of that lineage, it was a gnot (Gnot?
GNOT?) running Plan 9; this would likely have been 1993 or 1994; I was in
high school and visited a college-student friend of mine who was interning
at the labs and Dennis Ritchie had one on his desk. As an aside, he kindly
spared me a few minutes; I confess I was too star-struck and embarrassed to
ask him to autograph my copy of K&R that I had brought along. Dennis was a
kind, humble person and I was always quite struck by that in comparison to
some other academic and industry super-stars I've met.
Anyway, my question is what was the evolutionary story of the gnot? I
recall being told that it had a 68020, a datakit interface, and some amount
of RAM that was small but non-trivial; perhaps 4MB? It seemed clearly
evolved from the series of earlier terminals presently under discussion.
And the next step in the evolution was a MIPS-based terminal; I can't
recall the name, though.
- Dan C.