Blit (computer terminal)
Blit is a programmable raster graphics computer terminal designed by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi Jr. of Bell Labs and released in 1982.
History
The Blit programmable
The folk etymology for the Blit name is that it stands for Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal, and its creators have also joked that it actually stood for Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato. However, Rob Pike's paper on the Blit explains that it was named after the second syllable of bit blit, a common name for the bit-block transfer operation that is fundamental to the terminal's graphics.[2] Its original nickname was Jerq, inspired by a joke used during a demo of a Three Rivers' PERQ graphic workstation and used with permission.[3]
Functionality
When initially switched on, the Blit looked like an ordinary textual
Each window initially ran a simple terminal emulator, which could be replaced by a downloaded interactive graphical application, for example a more advanced terminal emulator, an editor, or a clock application. The resulting properties were similar to those of a modern Unix windowing system; however, to avoid having user interaction slowed by the serial connection, the interactive interface and the host application ran on separate systems—an early implementation of distributed computing.
Window systems
Pike wrote two window systems for the Blit, mpx for
9front (a Plan 9 fork) contains a Blit emulator that runs its original firmware,[5] which can be used with mux (available in recently released Research Unix v8[6]).
See also
- 3B series computers, some of which also used the WECO 32000 processor, were often used with DMD 5620s
- 9wm
- rio
- Thin client
- X terminal
References
- ^ AT&T/Teletype 5620 Dot Mapped Display Terminal
- S2CID 34062559.
- ^ Pike, Rob (19 December 2019). "Re: [TUHS] Blit source". TUHS. Retrieved 29 October 2020.
The name, originally coined for a fun demo of the Three Rivers Perq by folks at Lucasfilm, was borrowed with permission by us
- ^ Eric Smith (25 August 2005). "AT&T 5620 (and Related Terminals) Frequently Asked Questions".
- ^ "Blit emulator source code".
- ^ "[TUHS] 8th Edition Research Unix on SIMH". Archived from the original on 2017-07-30. Retrieved 2017-12-20.
- Notes
- This article is based in part on the Jargon File, which is in the public domain.
- Holwerda, Thom (August 29, 2012), "Blit: a multitasking, windowed UNIX GUI from 1982", OSNews, retrieved September 15, 2012
External links
- Bart Locanthi, Rob Pike: Blit (MPEG) (YouTube), the classic animated short about the windowing terminal project (it was necessary to explain how mice worked back then; this was 1982, two years before the MPEG)
- Source code (contains proprietary code) 5620