What's more interesting is that the Blit and it's software suite, which was well ahead of its time (literally five years before X windows came up on the VT1000, which is a rather similar terminal hardware-wise) went absolutely nowhere in the market. No one had heard of it. No one sold it. No one produced a competitor.

And it's all because by that point AT&T had walled the Unix team off from the market. None of this stuff got out, where the equivalent (and, arguably, inferior) work that would be done at MIT years later was free.

The Blit isn't just an amusing historical note, or (yet another) testament to the brilliance of its creators. It's also a really sad existence proof of the power of open source software.

Rereading this I realize I got my hardware mixed up: X was written on the VS100 terminal. The VT1000 was, in fact, an X terminal from many years later. And early versions of X were done closer to the Blit's era, in 1984-85. It wasn't until 1986 that the widely shared X10 release showed up, though.

David Langford's fictional BLIT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_%28short_story%29 ) is not bad either, as a hack concept ...