rob@alice.UUCP (08/23/83)
enough people jumped in to correct the error's in wake's article that i will only mention that the corrections are correct. fischer's complaint about windows being badly utilized is more serious. if what you stack up are asr33 windows, what you get is stacks of asr33 windows. if the blit is what he is complaining about, and that is implied by his message, i counter that there is much more going on than that. the default window program is a little scrolling terminal, but it is often replaced by programs that make much better use of the facilities available, especially the graphics. we have windows that edit files, debug programs, monitor system performance, edit icons and, of course, play games. the asr33 windows are themselves stopgaps. my personal version of the software runs by default a window that lets you edit the text on the screen, scroll around in it, and copy it to and from unix and the other windows. nothing at all like an asr33 (or a concept 100, for that matter). but i think fischer is complaining that the windows aren't interrelated in some deep way as they are in, say, smalltalk. i argue that the blit's success comes largely from the independence of the windows, which capitalizes on the multiprogramming capabilities of unix. there are plenty of examples of this in action, at least one of which he admits to having seen: debugging when the debugger and the subject process are decoupled is a whole new experience. so, the windows are quite well used, thank you, although they might not be used the way fischer expects.
mjk@tty3b.UUCP (08/23/83)
If Rob Pike is the horse, I don't know what we are here at Teletype. I won't speculate, either. Since there is some confusion over what applies to the blit and what to the 5620, maybe this note will help clear that up. The 5620 is a redesign of the Blit, incorporating many of Rob's (and others) ideas. It uses a 32-bit micro (the BELLMAC-32 [trademark of Western Electric]) and come with 256K bytes RAM, 64K bytes ROM standard. The memory is planned to be expandable to 1 MB RAM, 256K ROM. The 5620 software is pretty much a straight "clean up and port" of some of the Blit software. Because of the limited bandwidth of the porters (and the seemingly limitless bandwidth of Blit software developers), I have to say "some"; in the first release (this November), not all Blit software will be available for the 5620. Suffice to say that the most important pieces (Tek 4014 emulation, multiple windows, jim text editor, cross-compiler and debugger) will be. Some others (font editor, fancier terminal program) may be. But don't worry that the rest of the Blit software won't be forthcoming; it will be. All Rob's other comments about usefulness of windows on the Blit apply equally to the 5620. The ability to have a program assume control of a window is a very powerful feature. It means, as Rob indicated, that you can do terminal emulation. It means you can design a custom terminal personality and load it into a window. Imagine a terminal designed to run vi (if that's your favorite editor); if you can write a program to implement that terminal, you can convert windows on your 5620 into that "vi terminal". Mike Kelly Teletype Corp. R&D ..!ihnp4!tty3b!mjk