9 ms·
Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982
- eyevariety 14y agoI dig the terminology they use. Layer is a great term. Also loved the distinct lack of chrome around layers. The invisible interface is still the future.
- sodiumphosphate 14y agoAgreed. I wish there was a way to get rid of all the chrome in OSX.
- glhaynes 14y agoI dunno, affordances are pretty nifty. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance) It's a tradeoff of clutter vs. learning curve. And I have to imagine the future will, as always, be a tradeoff between the two.
- eyevariety 14y agoIts a great point and I love a good set of affordances, that said all it took was seeing the 4 finger gestures on the ipad once and I could never forget them. The 4 finger pull the a up for switching and full hand movement for closing the app are so natural. OsX has gotten rid of the little handles on the edge too- I imagine its all going to disappear.
- 1SaltwaterC 14y agoIt's a UNIX system! I know this!
- majke 14y agoRob Pike again. Over the years he's done pretty much _everything_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
- re_todd 14y agoThat's a smart dude, I'm surprised I haven't heard of him earlier. But I can't help but think he would seem twice as brilliant if he had a neckbeard :)
- terhechte 14y agoI could work on this system. Give me a couple of terminals with vim, and a webbrowser in a different layer (of course that system precedes the web) and I could do 90% of what I'm doing today to get work done.
- jamescun 14y agoI am the same. I often consider setting up a UNIX system similar to this, without the web browser, to increase my productivity.
- terhechte 14y agoI find the webbrowser necessary for documentation (especially crowd sourced like StackOverflow)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- steevdave 14y agoLynx? Links -g possibly as well. Though yeah most of the web would be broken, I would hope documentation sites would work in it.
- mhd 14y agoAh, early GUIs. For comparison, take a look at Xerox' Cedar and Smalltalk, or Wirth's Lillith and Oberon, all from pretty much the same era. The Lilith systems are often overlooked. They predate the Blit, are programmed in Modula-2, translated to bytecode. Oberon is a bit more well-known, but still not as much as both the language and the OS deserve. Lilith demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc Some screenshots & pics: http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-of-lilith http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-of-lilith Cedar demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk (Smalltalk and Oberon are a bit easier to find and more well-known anyway)
- sp332 14y agoAh, early GUIs. Sadly, the 5620 launched in 1984, the same year as the first Macintosh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.p...
- mhd 14y agoNot really competitors. The VT220 terminal (the target for every "terminal emulator") came out in '83.
- fosap 14y agoIf you want more modern early GUIs investigate Plan 9, also by Rob Pike. Rio is like Blit and ACME is like Oberon.
- Paul_S 14y agoExcept for the green tinge that's pretty much what my setup looks like. Borderless terminals in a tiling window manager with vim and assorted CLI programs. Except of course for iceweasel. Because there's only so far w3m will take you (not very).
- aerique 14y agoHave you looked at elinks for terminal browsing?
- Paul_S 14y agoYeah, elinks handles more websites and renders closer to a graphical browser but w3m uses vim keys.
- mhd 14y agoWell, if you're not that tied to terminal apps, there's always xombrero, jumanji, dwb or luakit. (Rob Pike himself is pretty proud that he never wrote a program with cursor addressing, there are definitely differences between modern Linux "minimalist" and proper 9fans) https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero http://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/ http://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://mason-larobina.github.com/luakit/ http://mason-larobina.github.com/luakit/
- dxgray 14y agoI had one of these on my desk in 1984. It was very usable. As for having more than one on a desk, you had better have a really well built one. As I recall, it weighed about 75lbs.
- leothekim 14y ago"Unix compilers are slow. So to entertain myself while I'm waiting, I can play asteroids! You see? Compiler errors print out even while asteroids is running!" (2:05) This was pretty revolutionary at the time, but for some reason those lines made me crack up. Also: "Is graphics good for anything other than playing games?" (2:19) The question sounded sort of facetious then as it does now, but for different reasons.
- Aykroyd 14y agoI love that line about playing asteroids. I was also entertained by the line towards the end of video: "I've always been able to think about multiple things at once but the terminal held me back." It seems like we all very much doubt that was ever true now.
- jff 14y agoIf in your last line you mean "Everyone works in terminal emulators all the time", that's not what he was going for. The intent of the statement you quote was that previous terminal hardware, such as the VT-100, gives you access to exactly one program at a time. GNU Screen was not to be invented until 1987, and I have not heard of any earlier terminal multiplexer.
- Aykroyd 14y agoSorry that was unclear. I was referring to the modern backlash against multitasking. Specifically, I'm sure that I can't think productively about more than one thing at a time. There's no question that this system was a technological achievement though and that having access to more than one running program at a time is a good thing.
- jebblue 14y agoThat was a nice reflection, I was in the military but wanted to be in computers. Great stuff. This one still gets me, Douglas Englebart was building the future of computing in 1968: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
- emehrkay 14y agoWithout getting too technical, what had to change under the hood and in hardware in order to make this happen?
- mhd 14y agoFor one, better monitors, where it was easy enough to distinguish pictures. Basically CRTs that are better than those required for TVs. But the biggest issue was display RAM. To get a decent enough resolution, you need an insane amount of memory, often 50+ kb! And then you need this for every terminal hooked up to the minicomputer/mainframe (don't even think about double-buffering). This was even an issue for the early text terminals. 72x20 characters was bad enough. Compare this to a line printer, where you just send a character and it stays there, without any backing memory. If I recall correctly, there were some experiments with persistent CRTs, and then of course terminals as we know them that had some memory of their own used to store the sent characters, and after a while even interpret quite elaborate escape sequences (compare sending one "^L" command to sending 80x24 spaces to clear a screen). Once RAM got cheaper and you had semi-decent monitors, you could build some pretty high resolution monochrome terminals. If you wanted color, too, you had to stay low-res, which is why this was mostly used for gaming, not for actual work. It took quite a while until you could build high-res color workstations, and those were pretty expensive at first. We live in enchanted times, don't we?
- LukeShu 14y agoThe first paragraph of Rob Pike's write up: The Blit* is a graphics terminal characterized more by the software it runs than the hardware itself. The hardware is simple and inexpensive (Figure 1): 256K bytes of memory dual-ported between an 800x1024x1 bit display and a Motorola MC68000 microprocessor, with 24K of ROM, an RS-232 interface, a mouse and a keyboard. Unlike many graphics terminals, it has no special-purpose graphics hardware; instead, the microprocessor executes all graphical operations in software. The reasons for and consequences of this design are discussed elsewhere. http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf
- wmf 14y ago
- joezydeco 14y agoAh, the AT&T 3B2. I learned heavy-duty assembly language programming on the WE32000, that was a really nice processor. Shame it never took off in the era of 80286 and 68000...
- ChuckMcM 14y agoPerhaps time has fogged your memory :-) That was a horrible processor. :-)
- joezydeco 14y agoHeh, maybe you're right. It was the first true 32-bit iron I got to use (halfword address exceptions! woo!), and it also had strcpy() built into a single opcode. I thought that was pretty cool...for 1986....
- mahcuz 14y ago:-)
- stox 14y agoIt was, especially, the jump and slide problem. The WE32100 and WE32200 rocked.
- wickedchicken 14y agoGod, here we go again. Yet another example of companies stealing from Apple. This is clearly similar enough to the Macintosh (1984) that I'm surprised Apple didn't sue the hell out of AT&T. They certainly sued the hell out of Microsoft[1], so AT&T must have been lucky. Around the same time, Myron Krueger had the gall to demonstrate pinch-to-zoom[2], nearly 23 years before Apple patented it. So many people piggy-backing off of Cupertino's innovation :/ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso... [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo (skip to 4:32)
- EGreg 14y agoWhen did Apple patent pinch-to-zoom? This video is from 1988. Are you saying Apple patented it in 2011? First of all in 2006, before the iPhone came out, I saw Jeff Han from NYU demoing much more than just pinch-to-zoom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ And secondly, I thought Apple bought the pinch-to-zoom patent! I don't know much about it, but I am curious about the date.
- wickedchicken 14y ago> When did Apple patent pinch-to-zoom? This video is from 1988. The video is from 1988, but it appears the work was around 1983. The pinch-to-zoom (on 'portable communication devices') patent[1] was filed in 2006, issued in 2010. [1] http://goo.gl/gHgEB http://goo.gl/gHgEB
- EGreg 14y agoIf that is the case, what about the Jeff Han video which came out in 2006? Jeff Han was obviously working on it for at least a year before he gave that talk. Shouldn't that be obvious prior art? He talks about pinch and much more!
- 001sky 14y agoYou may want to read this. Posted early to HN. Has hitsory of Multi Touch development. As of 1998/1999. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448186 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448186
- saddino 14y agoI remember playing with one at Bell Labs in 82 or 83. The mouse was gigantic but looked AWESOME (black orb with red buttons). Not sure if the commercial version had the same issue, but it was slow, especially when spawning a new layer. Favorite thing: the "wait" cursor was a cute little coffee cup with steam rising from it (i.e. "this is going to take a while so grab yourself some coffee").
- CurtHagenlocher 14y agoI had an AT&T 5620 in my dorm room. Didn't use the GUI features at all, but its giant screen was awesome for Emacs.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rafitorres 14y agoLove the music. Kinda reminds me of The Computer Chronicles with Stewart Cheifet: http://archive.org/details/computerchronicles http://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
- Maakuth 14y agoBlit even had some capabilities for terminal side software so that it wasn't entirely "dumb terminal" [1]. After logging in the host was able to upload some code that would run on the terminal during the session, but would be gone after power cycle. In a sense one could compare it to a web browser of today. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)
- anujkk 14y ago..... but we are hackers and we like green fonts on black terminals.
- noamsml 14y agoIt's interesting to see that the focus in this video is on showing as much information on the screen at the single time, a sort of "swing of the pendulum" that has now gone the other way with mobile UIs such as iOS, Android and (to a lesser extent) Windows 8.
- stox 14y agoBlit (68K ) ==> DMD5620 ( WE32K ) ==> 630MTG (68K) == 730MTG (68K) The 630 was also know as the "Son of a Blit" Piece of humor. The graphics workstation for Plan9 was a 68020 board put into a 630/730MTG chassis, but with a DMD5620 keyboard. People would walk up to it and ask if it was 630. To which, the response was, it's not. It was later simply named, the Gnot.
- stox 14y agoI miss gebaca.
- luriel 14y agoLink doesn't seem to work anymore, here is the same video (I assume) and a the original paper describing the Blit: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/
- keithpeter 14y ago"The mouse has three buttons, and the Blit software maintains a convention about what the buttons do." http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf RISCOS and Arthur (Acorn Computers, UK) had a three button mouse and the middle button brought up a local menu for the window under the button. I often wondered where that came from...
- nameuserc 14y agoIt has been said on HN that Xerox got some pre-IPO Apple stock options so it's all good. Yeah right. By all accounts Steve Jobs was a weasel. Of course, all those accounts could be wrong.