Mozilla v Firefox 408
 |
Snip-- Use of tagged descriptors for all array references, all references to code, and all references to...
in my youth, i taught myself how to type on am old resurrected 1930s era typewriter that had seen better days. that wasn't a particular hard shift problem. the hardest time i had with shift key was on tty33.
some people from cambridge brought out a copy of cp67-cms the last week of jan68 to the university to install.
cp67 had 2741 and 1052 terminal support. the university was getting tty33s and needed ascii-tty support. the 2741-1052 support was sort of interesting ... it attempted to dynamically determine the type of terminal on each line-port and use the 2702 sad command to buttociated the appropriate line-scanner with that port.
i thot i was going to be smart and extend the code to also dynamically determine tty (as part of providing generalized tty-ascii terminal support). I actually wanted to have a single dial-up number for all terminals with pool of ports. in early testing, it all seemed to work and then the local ibm engineer pointed out that there was some short-cuts made in the 2702 ... and while any line-scanner could be buttociated with any port ... the 2702 had specific oscillator hardwired to specific ports (fixing each ports baud rate). it wasn't an issue with 2741 and 1052 support since they operated at the same baud rate ... but it was a problem with tty since it used a different baud rate.
The IBM 2250, of course, was a vector graphics display terminal that came in several configurations. One depended on the host computer for all the work, another had an IBM 1130 as a local...
this sort of prompted the university to kick off a project to build their own terminal control unit. basically reverse engineer the ibm channel interface and build our own channel board which was installed in an interdate-3 minicomputer ... programmed to emulate a mainframe controller. one of the things that was done in the interdata was to do high rate strobe of each port to allow dynamic determination of terminal baud rate. later somebody wrote this up making some claim that four of us spawned the mainframe plug-compatible controller business.
minor past posts
the pcm controller business is given as the justification for the (major) future system (FS) project
which was eventually end w-o every being announced (or even most people even knowing that existed).
But this is a different and orthogonal issue. The previous discussion was about every memory cell (word) carrying a tag to tell what data is in it...
there is also some buttertion that the future system project, in turn motivated the mainframe plug-compatible processor business (mainframe clones) ... minor reference on the