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

[Russell Reiter]

On Fri, Feb 8, 2019, 12:15 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org
wrote:

> | 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 went to a vocational school which had a full blown print shop and touch
typing classes for students in the administrative track. Our curriculum and
textbooks were a little out of date, but I specifically recall the
definition of a typewriter as a person and the typewriting machine as the
tool. Although that may have been in a historical context, academically
speaking, I always remember that distinction.

I also remember running bristol board through the waxer and cutting and
pasting typewritten text in preparation for creating photo offset printing
plates. Also some wierd tool where you could insert a font wheel, which
came in several point sizes for headlines etc. You dialed each letter one
by one, just like a dymo label tool, except the result was printed and not
embossed and then it was pasted up to create a photo negative which was
used in order to create the positive plate for offset printing.

I probably should have said compositing process in my origional post.
Certainly the people who took touch typing as part of secretarial and
administrative course work wouldn't call it a compositing machine.


> 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).
>

I remember at one point that it was Xerox corporation who tried to sue in
order to stop employees from saying take this to the copy room and Xerox
it, unless an actuall Xerox machine was being used. That one didnt get out
of the gate.

>
> 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.
>

I liked what he said at the end about finding what you like about systemd
and working with that. Along with affirming that no one should have sent
Lennart Pottering death threats over systemd development. A little good
humored dissent is one thing, a culture of contempt is quite another. Kudos
to the presenter for framing some of the more divisive issues of teamwork
in a most humane way.

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