22 Nov
2017
22 Nov
'17
10:33 p.m.
On Wed, Nov 22, 2017, at 05:43, Nigel Williams wrote:
I stumbled into a reddit post on Unix with the claim
about early Unices
only being accessed via printing terminals, and it suggested a question
to me as to the first “glass teletype” or CRT terminal to be used with
Unix.
While this isn't necessarily indicative of what was physically used
either as a dumb terminal or with specialized applications, the 1BSD
termcap predecessor at
http://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/etc/ttycap may be
informative.
Of the 22 terminal descriptions listed, nine seem to be for CRT
terminals: Three without cursor-addressability (adm3, datamedia,
teleray) five with (adm3a, beehiveIIIm, fox, hazeltine, hp2645), and the
tek4014 (which was an advanced graphical terminal as others have
mentioned, but completely unsuited to vi). The ADM-3A is of course
famous as the most common terminal used at Berkeley, and the one vi was
designed for.
As far as I know (and I've gone looking for this specifically, oddly
enough, out of idle curiosity), no version of termcap/terminfo has
contained a description for the VT05.