[GTALUG] video: Benno Rice on "The Tragedy of systed"

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Russell Reiter via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| These days people can laugh at the UNIX concept of connecting typewriters
| but in the lexicon of the 60's the typewriter was the person and the
| typwriting machine was the compositing device.

Not in the 1960's.  Perhaps in the 1860's.

In the 1960's I had a typewriter.  And it wasn't a human (slaves had
been emancipated; actually before 1860 in Upper Canada).

And we didn't think of typewriters as doing compositing.  If you did
it, you did it with a board and with wax as temporary glue (but
ordinary people didn't do that).

I'm pretty sure that they used the word "typewriter" since "Teletype"
was and is a registered trademark of Teletype Corporation (registered
1916) (now called Teletype LLC).  If I remember correctly, at the
time, Teletype Corporation was owned by ATT.

Under US trademark law, if the owner of a trademark allows the name to be
widely used generically, they lose the trademark.  Think "Aspirin" (no
longer protected in US but still Bayer's in Canada, I think).

At the time, UNIX seemed to call the devices TTYs.  Generically.

The industry called them "terminals", but that's a terrible name.  It
kind of means "endpoint of a circuit".  But then a lineprinter, a
papertape reader, a lamp could all be called terminals.

"Typewriter" was a pretty good term.  Ordinary folks knew what a
typewriter was.

Originally UNIX ran on the DEC PDP-7 and then PDP-11.  They came with
a real Teletype model 33 or 35.  Horrible but amazing (supposedly a
design based on a German WWII device; no machined parts!).

I managed to get UNIX to support an IBM 2741, which was an IBM
Selectric typewriter with a serial connection.  This was not easy
since the 2741 used a totally different character set ("tilt rotate
code") and was half-duplex on a line-of-text basis.

When CRT terminals came in, there was a struggle for naming them (not
to mention architecting them):

- glass TTYs

- VDU (Video Display Unit)

- [CRT] terminal <== the winner in my world

| Unix is dead and all thats left is Linux and some rounding errors. & Ask
| grampa about getty.

MacOS and offshoots are somewhat UNIX and quite widespread.

But, sadly, his point is valid.