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Re:Blit – The first Unix graphical multi-programming termina... by kjs3 on Tuesday September 30, 2014 @03:21PM (#8390536)
I used a Blit successor (AT&T 5620 nee DMD) in the 1985ish time frame. It was attached to an AT&T 3B2 host running SVr3 and later SVr4. It was a very cool, minimal, useful and very Unixy way of doing things. The "window manager" software was called "Layers", and allowed a lot of application processing to happen on the terminal. Layers windows behaved (mostly) just like ttys multiplexed back to the host. There was a pretty decent cross development environment for creating little apps, including a C compiler and debugger. There were the normal doodads like a graphical clock, drawing program (pic?), calculator. There was also a pretty neat mouse-enables editor called 'jim' and I seem to remember a sort of troff previewer. Pretty much the coolest thing I'd ever used up until I got a Sun 3/160 in '86 or so running SunOS 3.x and OpenWindows. Game over.
Re:Blit – The first Unix graphical multi-programming termina... by MaDeuce on Tuesday September 30, 2014 @05:02PM (#8391206)
Pretty much the same story for me. When I first joined the Labs, I got a 5630 (the successor to the 5620), also called the 630 MTG. At the time, it was an impressive piece of equipment that was a huge improvement over a regular tty.

I found the video to be somewhat lacking in interesting technical details -- there really were a lot of neat things going on in the background to make it all happen.

Readers waxing nostalgic might enjoy Rob Pike's paper describing the 5620. It provides an in-depth look at what was going on behind the scenes.

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/

Of course, I subsequently got a Sun 3/60 and never looked back. But it was fun while it lasted.

Re:Blit – The first Unix graphical multi-programming termina... by kjs3 on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @12:42AM (#8392866)
Interesting...I've never heard the 630 called a 5630. Very cool. I actually played a little with a 730X (successor to 630 with ethernet and an X server in ROM) back in the dark ages. Layers was pretty rotted by then and it was a terrible XTerm, especially WRT to the hotrods NCD was cranking out. Kinda sad.

Yet another Tech Taking Over The World^TM that didn't. I've got some bubble memory and a Symbolics around here someplace.