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A Multitasking GUI, Circa 1982
autospa points out a post (with video) showing off the multi-tasking abilities of the Blit terminal, developed in 1982 by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi. Before Windows, before X, and before the Mac (but somewhat later than the Xerox Alto), the Blit terminal provided a multitasking, mouse-driven graphical interface; it took a Unix server on the other side to do the heavy lifting, though.
Brought us TOS/GEM in a totally usable package, so this is not *that* special.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Lets go back to the future and use it.
Contrary to TFA, multitasking existed before 1982
Does it run linux?
I don't care so much if it were the first or not. It was still cool for it's time. In my mind, this one being among the first was still quite an achievement.. because if you think about it, not much has changed since then. It really hasn't. Sure the boxes are faster today, and the applications more sophisticated... but the basics of multitasking are more or less the same today.... we stand on the shoulders of giants.
On another note, I like the look of the portrait oriented monitor. It looks to be so much better suited to documents, and probably coding, than the mostly landscape orientations that came later.
Huh?
... Linux runs it!
Sounds like a good idea. It might catch on.
In 1985 the Amiga brought "real" multitasking to the home computer using masses, many years before it was available in Windows or Mac environments.
Of course multitasking was around long before that, but I think the Amiga 1000 is what made it available to Joe Sixpack, who wasn't going to be using heavy duty Unix workstations or what ever.
Man, I'd forgotten how awful those green and orange phosphor screens could be!
#DeleteChrome
Maybe not the first graphical system, maybe not the first multitasking system... But I wonder if this is the earliest recorded example of crappy programmer art? :p
A blit sounds nearly as capable as a BBN Bitgraph, which in 1982 had a 68000, a bunch of RAM, a mouse, a portrait display (I don't remember the resolution), bitmapped graphics and a windowing system. Nostalgia runs so deep for the BitGraph that it's still supported by gnuplot, dvi drivers, ghostview...
Not that many people ever got a chance to use a blit, but bitgraphs were workhorses of their day. It was hard to get some people to trade them in for Sun 3's.
Plus, Rob Pike didn't have anything to do with it.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Had one of these (DMD-5620) in my cube in the late 80s at Western Electric at the Allentown, PA location. It was my first exposure to having multiple windows available - absolutely loved the idea of having multiple tasks running in multiple windows. We were the WECo waferfab - loved the idea that the CPU was a Mac32 (aka WE32000) which we fabbed in Allentown. Brings back good memories although the WECo and the fab are gone - the fabs were torn down and replaced by a baseball field! Real jobs where people actually produced something replaced by a field of dreams...
And more importantly, how many granted software patents could potentially be threatened by such a simple display of prior art?
Or, how many earlier patents would have threatened its own existence?
Unless she sleeps on her front.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I had one of these on my desk while it was being tested in the Labs before the commercial product was released. When you got up after an afternoon staring at all that monochrome green, the rest of the world looked slightly pink :^) Test users had to provide regular feedback. One consequence was that every few weeks they came around and replaced the keyboard with an improved version. The last one was easily the best programmer's keyboard I ever used: all keys in the right place, wonderful touch.
products beginning in the early '80s, starting with Apollo Computer, and soon including Sun Microsystems, DEC Micro Vax, and dozens of others. It doesn't really remind me of Lisa or Mac that much.
A total tangent, but is narrator's accent Philly or NJ? Or something else? To me, he sounds like a guy burn in the NE, moved to Philly as a kid, then went to school in the west coast.
I always love links to computer history. What about Engelbart's Mother of all Demos in 1968?
I had a DMD5620 in my dorm room in 1989. My roommate called it "the Beast".
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
So it's a contemporary of the Lisa (introduced January 1983, so finished development in 1982 also), which didn't require a Unix host.
... were just the next logical step beyond simple ASCII terminals,
and before a decent graphics protocol (X, etc.).
For some background/data on how those things fit together, see here:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/ttys.html
Enjoy!
- Hubert
OMG. How very little has changed in 28 years.
If only I could run that on my iPad, I'd be able to multitask on it, too!
The CB App. What's your 20?
I always thought that acronym was pronounced G-U-I until I saw that infamous CSI clip. It just feels stupid saying it as 'gooey'.
My A500 shits on your ST
. .
Used one of the original blit terminals when I worked for AT&T. The later 5620 was much faster and a nice little terminal back in the day.
I still say Gee-You-Eye. And I still say Ess-Cee-Ess-Eye instead of Scuzzy.
I'm an ultra-geek I guess.
I still say Gee-You-Eye. And I still say Ess-Cee-Ess-Eye instead of Scuzzy.
I'm an ultra-geek I guess.
Or a slow (verbal) communicator.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I had one (5620)! Was very cool... ...and who could forget the game, GEBACA! (GEt BAck At Corporate America -- a shoot 'em up came where the targets are corporate logos)?
[The Atari ST's TOS/GEM] wasn't useless and did multitask. True it was via special applications referred to as 'accessories'. However, if you used a wedge you could stick any application in as an accessory and as long as it didn't need to write to the screen to keep running while back grounded, it worked rather well..
Let's put this in context. That somewhat stretched, certainly limited and somewhat kludgey version of "multitasking" might sound passable compared to MS-DOS-based PCs of the same era. Not that big a feat given that mid-80s PCs were running MS-DOS, an early-1980s ripoff, er.... *port* of the 1970s 8-bit-microcomputer-era OS CP/M.
However, the ST's main rival, the Commodore Amiga (which hit the streets at almost exactly the same time as the ST- mid-1985, and not 1984 as you state) featured full pre-emptive multitasking as a standard part of the operating system. No silly restrictions or workarounds for what was basically a single-tasking OS required, because multitasking was an integral part of the OS. You simply ran two or more programs at once and they worked- period.
And this was "proper" pre-emptive multitasking, not the more primitive co-operative multitasking (which relied on well-written programs yielding control themselves) that even Windows 3.x was still using in the early 1990s.
Thing is that although the Amiga was generally a more advanced computer than the ST, it had the same basic CPU- the 68000- running at similar (actually, slightly slower) speed- and to the best of my knowledge its multitasking (and other aspects of the OS) weren't reliant on the Amiga's custom hardware. So I'm pretty sure the 68000-based STs *could* have run a more advanced multitasking OS in theory, even a port of the one that the Amiga had(?!)
But the fact was that they didn't, at least not back then, and the "multitasking" you describe was at best a restricted hack that clearly *wasn't* the best that could be done at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS9
OS9 was a wickedly cool operating system, which could multitask surprisingly well on the Motorola 6809. While never quite what you might call "mainstream", it was popular with some hobbyists. A friend of mine showed off his TRS-80 running OS9 once, and I was suitably impressed, even though I had an Amiga and an 80386 PC running OS/2, both of which were obviously more advanced. It was a very powerful, sleek system that probably should have caught on more than it did.
Of course, there was also GEOS, the Amiga OS, the Atari ST, and OS/2, but those came a bit later than OS9 (which dates back to 1979!). I still have fond memories of my Amiga, the massive flamewars of Amiga vs Atari, and the poor Apple fanboys with their black and white OS that barely even multitasked.
go eat shit
I loved my STs, but let's be realistic here. TOS was a singletasking operating system. The first real multitasking OS on the ST was probably MiNT, which was for a long time really an "experts only" option. Multitasking on the ST line that was usable by the masses didn't really exist until MultiTOS, which was, what, 1992?
I was definitely an ST fanboy back in the day, but you've got to admit, the Amiga was simply a better system.
Isn't that this thing with the parrot you die from looking at?
The guy that posted Bill English's Alto video is on crack if he thinks this is from 1974. The mouse is a Hawley "Mouse House" mouse from the 80's.
Real Alto mice are more rounded and don't have rectangular buttons. Bill also looks about 20 years older than he should if this were from 1974.
It makes you wonder, how the software industry would look right now if that project would have been competition or replacement for windows. Just asking, exactly how much did we lose because of the MS monopoly?
It did survive. NCD, Tektronix, and others sold graphics terminals which supported X
It was reinvented in the Windows world as thin clients.
We didn't LOSE anything, the market decided the difference in price between a PC and an X terminal wasn't worth the bother.
Darinbob writes:
> I've used one of these, and it was kind of nice. The drawback
> compared to X Windows was that it was not very standardized or common.
To be fair, X wasn't very standardized or common in the early days.
There were a lot of windowing systems in the 1980s. X became the
defacto standard. I always thought Display PostScript seemed interesting.
> It was quite usable over a normal serial link or even a modem, since
> it used a lot less bandwidth than X.
In the early 1980s at the Labs, most of us connected via 1200 baud modems. :-)
The Ethernet switch didn't exist yet, so we used a phone switch.
(What do you expect, we were part of the phone company.)
HomelessInLaJolla writes:
> Before 1982, one can only do one thing at a time on any computer.
Feh. I was doing multiple things at once on a pdp11 in the 1970s with
a dumb ascii terminal. Along with 50 other users. And it was fast.
russotto writes:
> So it's a contemporary of the Lisa (introduced January 1983, so finished
> development in 1982 also), which didn't require a Unix host.
The Lisa was a toy compared with Unix.
http://ozguru.mu.nu/Photos/2005-11-11--Dilbert_Unix.jpg
That Bacon, Lettuce and Interactive Tomato generated some serious terminal
envy, let me tell you.
DesQview had multitasking for dos in /85. IBM had topview a year before but it failed.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
At 1982 Rob Pike was late to this party. MIT Lisp Machines had this stuff in the late 1970's. I used them in 1979 and they were already in full swing. Xerox PARC also had their Interlisp system at about the same time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Blit was commercialized into the DMD5620 using a 32 bit WE32000 processor. Sadly, this made it prohibitively expensive. To make it more price competitive, it was redone with a 68000 processor as the 630MTG. This was ironic, as the original Blit was also based on the 68000. Later a network interface, supporting both OSI and TCP/IP, was added along with additional memory and a faster CPU as the 730MTG. The 730MTG could also run X-Windows.
They were remarkably productive over a serial line.
I miss Gebaca!
Another fork off the Blit design was the Not. It was based on a 68020 processor, and was the original graphics workstation for Plan 9. The origin of the name is amusing, it looked like a 630MTG with a DMD5620 keyboard and mouse. When asked if it was a 630, the answer was that is was Not. A name was born.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Back in the day I was given one of these as my workstation (I had an internship at bellcore labs) and since then I've always eschewed VI, Emacs and all the rest of the various Byzantine editing packages out there.
There's something to be said about a clean, easy to understand workspace that let you have multiple command windows open and easily move (read as "copy and paste") information between windows.
Does anyone else remember GEBACA on the BLIT terminal?
It was a fantastically addictive little game. Loved it...
If you remember it, do you remember what GEBACA was an acronym for?
(I remember, but I thought it would be a good trivia question...)
This was nice for 1984, but by 1985, the Amiga 1000 had a main processor, and three co-processors, one of which was a bit engine for doing graphics. It was called a blitter, and bitmapped objects were called bobs. Bobs were bigger than sprites, could move whole sections of the screen around without bothering the processor, and could move many colors. The sprite engine (good for the mouse pointer) was only good for a much smaller graphical footprint (about the size of a mouse pointer), and was limited in how many colors could be in the sprite. The difference between 1985 and 1984 is that all of this was self-contained (no unix box doing the heavy lifting). Jay Miner is no longer around, so someone has to mention some of this stuff.
Anyone have a picture?
A true "Fisher Price" moment.:)
I wrote a multi-user multi-tasking system for a PDP-8 that had 8k of core memory in 1972 or 73. it time sliced and ran two asr-33 terminals, each terminal could run Focal in its own 4k of ram.
DOesn't anyone here remember Doug Engelbart & The Mother of all Demos? The year was 1968, it was a technical marvel and was very carefully arranged, but REAL - it was a spare no expense demo of what was possible with the current technology:
Here's the first of 9 videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs
Oh wait, computers didn't exist before Steve Jobs & that guy with the beard invented them, right?
Really poor research...
Ken
Rob Pike worked at AT&T Bell Labs in 1982. I remember watching his demonstration of the Blit. I was using a production version in my work 10 years later. (I was not an early adopter. I got one when every one else seemed to already have them.) I guess this is another example of the way AT&T "stifled innovation". :-)
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/03/29/1437239/Ma-Bell-Stifled-Innovation-ATampT-May-Do-the-Same
I used a Mentor Graphics Apollo workstation from 1982 for PCB design, software development, word processing, etc. It multi-tasked... compiling, reading errors (I mean *features*) and correcting the code in another window was awesome coming from a DEC environment. Windowing, mouse, etc. I never understood what all the hubbub was about... switched directly to a Mac after I left that company.
Being AC, I'm aware you won't be able to reply to this in a way that I'll ever see, but a bit of (apocryphal) information you might like on the TRS-80 Color Computer series that ran OS-9...
While the Coco 1 and 2 could run OS-9, it was the 3 that really shined in this arena. The machine came stock with 256k, iirc, but was expandable to 512 on-board. That's nice, but doesn't really thrill anyone.
At the time that the Mac II's were out, though, there was an add-in that replaced the 6809 with a daughterboard which included both a 68000 and two megs of RAM.
Take that modification, add in the disk controller hard (2x 5 1/4" drives), hard drive controller card (20MB hdd), OS-9, and a mouse, and you had a multitasking graphical minicomputer.
Tack on a dumb terminal and the serial port controller and you made it multiuser as well, since OS-9 could do that out of the box.
"Before 1982, one could only do one thing on a computer at a time". I suppose, then, that multitasking mainframes, or Unix workstation, or some other minicomputers, didn't exist.
mark "can tell tales of punchcards...."
"Now consider the 'cloud' push, and concepts like Google's ChromeOS. The web browser is becoming the modern day equivalent of a X terminal in a sense."
The HTTP and HTML page request/response mechanism has been compared, with a fair degree of accuracy, to the IBM 3270 terminal system. The web server is the mainframe, the big unseen untouchable system where all the data lives. The terminal/browser stores no data.
"There is nothing new under the sun." (from Ecclesiastes 1:9-14, reportedly written about 2250 years ago)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Do anyone know why the hell they choose black text on bright green background and not the more obvious, and common at the time, green on black ?
See subject-line above, & these "prime examples" below via links to the originals of WHY hairyfeet shouldn't have gone to "ITT Tech" (because he clearly doesn't even understand how HOSTS files benefit you for added security, speed, and even to a degree extra 'anonymity' online):
---
Static vs. Dynamic (lol, "according to hairyfeet"):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35681060
---
Only thing constantly changing's your "math", 3x ++ or more no less:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35686444
and
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35686566
as well as this:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35686630
---
Hairyfeet's single solutions FAILURES? See inside:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690260
---
Your sources vs. mine (AND myself, a source on it):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690328
---
Lastly, as to your LIBEL of myself (w/ arstech):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35668740
---
The defeat of hairyfeet by APK videos:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690536
---
They say it all, & usually vs. hairyfeet's own words quoted! I wouldn't pay him too much heed, especially after you read the above b.s., lies, changing figures, & even LIBEL of others that hairyfeet likes to do. After all - he's from "ITT Tech" (student).
APK
P.S.=> Personally though - because hairyfeet is only a "techie"? I suspect he doesn't want people to know about HOSTS files' added LAYERED SECURITY benefits to the end-user: Why? Because if users stop getting so much "malware-in-general" which layered security (and HOSTS) give you, he's out money...apk
See subject-line above, & these "prime examples" below via links to the originals of WHY hairyfeet shouldn't have gone to "ITT Tech" (because he clearly doesn't even understand how HOSTS files benefit you for added security, speed, and even to a degree extra 'anonymity' online):
---
Static vs. Dynamic (lol, "according to hairyfeet"):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35681060
---
Only thing constantly changing's your "math", 3x ++ or more no less:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35686444
and
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35686566
as well as this:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35686630
---
Hairyfeet's single solutions FAILURES? See inside:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690260
---
Your sources vs. mine (AND myself, a source on it):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690328
---
Lastly, as to your LIBEL of myself (w/ arstech):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35668740
---
The defeat of hairyfeet by APK videos:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690536
---
They say it all, & usually vs. hairyfeet's own words quoted! I wouldn't pay him too much heed, especially after you read the above b.s., lies, changing figures, & even LIBEL of others that hairyfeet likes to do. After all - he's from "ITT Tech" (student).
APK
P.S.=> Personally though - because hairyfeet is only a "techie"? I suspect he doesn't want people to know about HOSTS files' added LAYERED SECURITY benefits to the end-user: Why? Because if users stop getting so much "malware-in-general" which layered security (and HOSTS) give you added layered protection against, he's out money...apk
"it took a Unix server on the other side to do the heavy lifting" - Oh, you mean this was an implementation of 'cloud computing'? As a mainframe guy, 'cloud computing' takes me back to my roots, sort of. I will give credit to the idea of the 'terminal' at the user end doing the GUI part - the UI on 3270s wasn't as interactive as you'd like - but both mainframes and X-Windows could be considered 'cloud computing'.
Nope- same here.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Oh good god, can't you stop for ONE DAY, you stupid troll?