30 years of GNU

30 years of GNU

Posted Sep 29, 2013 17:42 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)
In reply to: 30 years of GNU by corbet
Parent article: 30 years of GNU

Even as late as the early 90s (when I joined the UNIX scene), we still had quite a mix of terminals and terminal emulations that made curses and proper TERMCAP settings very important. At the university I attended, I encountered, among other things:

• An actual DecWriter II (although I never actually saw anyone use it).
• Viewpoint terminals (both Viewpoint and VP60s)
• Liberty Freedom-1s
• AT&T 620 (layers based!)
• UNIX-PC / PC-7300s
• Console mode on Sun IPCs, ELCs, SparcStations, etc. (Anyone who stayed in 'console' more than a minute, though, generally got nastygrams from all other users logged in in short order, since display updates in console mode blocked proper multitasking. Launching ELM at console guaranteed you more than a few angry messages.)
• Console mode on 0.99.x era Linux
• A plethora of terminal emulators across DOS and Windows (Kermit, Minicom, QModem, NCSA Telnet, MS Telnet, etc. etc.)
• Subtle differences between xterm variants (persists until this day).

I guess the main difference by the time I got there was that everything was shifting to terminal emulators on PCs and Macs as opposed to dedicated terminals. We still had many dedicated terminals, but by the time I left, most everything was on a PC or Mac in some form.

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