
Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982 - fogus
http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2012/8/27/AT&T-Archives-BLIT-UNIX-GUI
======
wickedchicken
_God_ , 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._Microso...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation)

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo> (skip to 4:32)

~~~
chmod775
I'm surprised AT&T didn't sue the hell out of apple because BLIT is clearly
older than the Macintosh. BLIT is actually from 1982 as is shown in the video
at 3:50 and in the copyright notice some seconds later. The wikipedia article
also claims it's 1882.

~~~
maratd
He was being sarcastic... unless you're being sarcastic too? Newsflash.
Sarcasm on the Internet does not work unless you use <sarcasm> tags!

~~~
molmalo
Just an example of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law>

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mhd
Ah, 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>

Some screenshots & pics: <http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-
of-lilith>

Cedar demo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk>

(Smalltalk and Oberon are a bit easier to find and more well-known anyway)

~~~
fosap
If you want more modern early GUIs investigate Plan 9, also by Rob Pike. Rio
is like Blit and ACME is like Oberon.

~~~
mhd
While the pedigree does stretch back a bit, I wouldn't call Acme "early". The
paper came out in '94…

~~~
pmarin
Acme is based on the Oberon system (1985)

~~~
mhd
Which in turn took quite some influence from Cedar/Mesa at Xerox. But one
might as well say that KDE 4.9 (2012) is based on MacOS (1984), that doesn't
make it an "early GUI" in my eyes.

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majke
Rob Pike again. Over the years he's done pretty much _everything_.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike>

~~~
re_todd
That'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 :)

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leothekim
"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
I 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
If 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
Sorry 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.

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dxgray
I 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.

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terhechte
I 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
I am the same. I often consider setting up a UNIX system similar to this,
without the web browser, to increase my productivity.

~~~
terhechte
I find the webbrowser necessary for documentation (especially crowd sourced
like StackOverflow)

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Paul_S
Except 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
Have you looked at elinks for terminal browsing?

~~~
Paul_S
Yeah, elinks handles more websites and renders closer to a graphical browser
but w3m uses vim keys.

~~~
mhd
Well, 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>

<http://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/>

<http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/>

<http://mason-larobina.github.com/luakit/>

~~~
sofuture
Also worth mentioning, surf: <http://surf.suckless.org/>

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saddino
I 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").

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luriel
Link 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/>

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stox
Blit (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.

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jebblue
That 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>

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rafitorres
Love the music. Kinda reminds me of The Computer Chronicles with Stewart
Cheifet: <http://archive.org/details/computerchronicles>

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Maakuth
Blit 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)>

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eyevariety
I 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.

~~~
glhaynes
I dunno, affordances are pretty nifty.
(<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
Its 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.

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keithpeter
"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>

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...

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noamsml
It'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.

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CurtHagenlocher
I 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.

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joezydeco
Ah, 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
Perhaps time has fogged your memory :-) That was a _horrible_ processor. :-)

~~~
joezydeco
Heh, 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....

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nameuserc
It 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.

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emehrkay
Without getting _too_ technical, what had to change under the hood and in
hardware in order to make this happen?

~~~
LukeShu
The 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>

~~~
wmf
This looks like more hardware than a contemporary Macintosh, so I have to ask:
inexpensive compared to what? A VAX?

~~~
drbawb
It used the same processor and 'only' twice the RAM.

Even assuming the RAM is the most expensive component, by definition, the
materials cost no more than twice the cost of the original Macintosh.
(~2500USD in 1984)

Of course, the Blit is just a terminal pulling applications down from a Unix
host over the serial port; when you consider that the Blit is _just_ a
display, it does indeed seem a bit pricey.

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anujkk
..... but we are hackers and we like green fonts on black terminals.

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stox
I miss gebaca.

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1SaltwaterC
It's a UNIX system! I know this!

