4 ms·

I realize naming things is hard, but they confuse me. Are these due to historical quirks, or am I missing something? E.g., why is it called a terminal emulator

I realize naming things is hard, but they confuse me. Are these due to historical quirks, or am I missing something? E.g., why is it called a terminal emulator and not a terminal user interface? Why is there a "y" in pty if it stands for pseudo terminal? Why is it call it a "pseudo terminal" if it's acting like a communication pipe?

cpuguy83 5y ago
Because a terminal (aka tty... or teletype) was a physical piece of hardware that we now emulate in software. The y in pty is because of tty.
jdougan 5y ago
Pty is a historical quirk: it stands for pseudo-tty, and tty is short for teletype. Actually there are a lot of things in old Unix that were influenced by the primary user interaction device being a slow (110 baud) printing terminal with no lowercase.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Expanding on what others have written: - The original terminal was a teletypewriter, printing onto paper, connected to a computer, usually through a serial interface. A teleltype is abbreviated "TTY", and the original Unix terminal interfaces were given the device file names /dev/tty, /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, ... Those were the hard-defined terminals. Yes, these were communication pipes, handling stdin (keyboard), and stdout and stderr (the printer). - As psuedo terminals came to be used, for users connected via "glass TTYs" (CRT terminals such as the venerable VT-100 and VT-200), or by entiirely virtualised terminals through remote connections (telnet, rsh) or windowing systems (W and X11), pty came to be used for pesudoterminal. Again, these were communication pipes. I used a variant similar to this VT-320, notable for its amber phosphr display: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=RuZUPpmXfT0 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=RuZUPpmXfT0 Yes, historical quirks. You can still hook Unix up to a teletype, by the way: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE

cpuguy83 5y ago

Because a terminal (aka tty... or teletype) was a physical piece of hardware that we now emulate in software. The y in pty is because of tty.

jdougan 5y ago

Pty is a historical quirk: it stands for pseudo-tty, and tty is short for teletype. Actually there are a lot of things in old Unix that were influenced by the primary user interaction device being a slow (110 baud) printing terminal with no lowercase.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Expanding on what others have written: - The original terminal was a teletypewriter, printing onto paper, connected to a computer, usually through a serial interface. A teleltype is abbreviated "TTY", and the original Unix terminal interfaces were given the device file names /dev/tty, /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, ... Those were the hard-defined terminals. Yes, these were communication pipes, handling stdin (keyboard), and stdout and stderr (the printer). - As psuedo terminals came to be used, for users connected via "glass TTYs" (CRT terminals such as the venerable VT-100 and VT-200), or by entiirely virtualised terminals through remote connections (telnet, rsh) or windowing systems (W and X11), pty came to be used for pesudoterminal. Again, these were communication pipes. I used a variant similar to this VT-320, notable for its amber phosphr display: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=RuZUPpmXfT0 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=RuZUPpmXfT0 Yes, historical quirks. You can still hook Unix up to a teletype, by the way: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE