Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982

http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2012/8/27/AT&T-Archives-BLIT-UNIX-GUI

by fogus • 14 years ago

157 76 14 years ago

techchannel.att.com

eyevariety2• 14 years ago

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.

sodiumphosphate• 14 years ago

Agreed. I wish there was a way to get rid of all the chrome in OSX.

glhaynes• 14 years ago

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.

eyevariety2• 14 years ago

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.

1SaltwaterC• 14 years ago

It's a UNIX system! I know this!

majke• 14 years ago

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

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

re_todd• 14 years ago

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 :)

terhechte2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

terhechte2• 14 years ago

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

steevdave• 14 years ago

Lynx? Links -g possibly as well. Though yeah most of the web would be broken, I would hope documentation sites would work in it.

mhd7• 14 years ago

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)

sp332• 14 years ago

Ah, early GUIs.

Sadly, the 5620 launched in 1984, the same year as the first Macintosh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.p...

mhd7• 14 years ago

Not really competitors. The VT220 terminal (the target for every "terminal emulator") came out in '83.

fosap2• 14 years ago

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

mhd7• 14 years ago

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

gchpaco• 14 years ago

It is creepy how much that looks like 8 1/2 and rio. Pike clearly thought he had a good thing.

gadders• 14 years ago

Oh man, I remember Modula-2. It was what my engineering course taught us to code in. That was handy on my CV.

wtracy• 14 years ago

I got a smile out of the Cedar demo talking about documents as user interfaces. Arguably the concept of the web as a user interface pre-dates the web!

mhd7• 14 years ago

The point being that this is an editable document serving as a user interface. Which, if I remember correctly, some people once envisioned for the web (cf. Amaya[1]), but never really took hold.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_%28web_editor%29

Paul_S3• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

Have you looked at elinks for terminal browsing?

Paul_S3• 14 years ago

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

dxgray• 14 years ago

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.

leothekim• 14 years ago

"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.

Aykroyd2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

jebblue• 14 years ago

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

emehrkay• 14 years ago

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

mhd7• 14 years ago

For one, better monitors, where it was easy enough to distinguish pictures. Basically CRTs that are better than those required for TVs.

But the biggest issue was display RAM. To get a decent enough resolution, you need an insane amount of memory, often 50+ kb! And then you need this for every terminal hooked up to the minicomputer/mainframe (don't even think about double-buffering).

This was even an issue for the early text terminals. 72x20 characters was bad enough. Compare this to a line printer, where you just send a character and it stays there, without any backing memory. If I recall correctly, there were some experiments with persistent CRTs, and then of course terminals as we know them that had some memory of their own used to store the sent characters, and after a while even interpret quite elaborate escape sequences (compare sending one "^L" command to sending 80x24 spaces to clear a screen).

Once RAM got cheaper and you had semi-decent monitors, you could build some pretty high resolution monochrome terminals. If you wanted color, too, you had to stay low-res, which is why this was mostly used for gaming, not for actual work. It took quite a while until you could build high-res color workstations, and those were pretty expensive at first.

We live in enchanted times, don't we?

LukeShu• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

Perhaps time has fogged your memory :-) That was a horrible processor. :-)

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

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....

mahcuz• 14 years ago

:-)

stox3• 14 years ago

It was, especially, the jump and slide problem. The WE32100 and WE32200 rocked.

wickedchicken2• 14 years ago

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...

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

EGreg2• 14 years ago

When did Apple patent pinch-to-zoom?

This video is from 1988. Are you saying Apple patented it in 2011?

First of all in 2006, before the iPhone came out, I saw Jeff Han from NYU demoing much more than just pinch-to-zoom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ

And secondly, I thought Apple bought the pinch-to-zoom patent! I don't know much about it, but I am curious about the date.

wickedchicken2• 14 years ago

> When did Apple patent pinch-to-zoom? This video is from 1988.

The video is from 1988, but it appears the work was around 1983. The pinch-to-zoom (on 'portable communication devices') patent[1] was filed in 2006, issued in 2010.

[1] http://goo.gl/gHgEB

001sky• 14 years ago

You may want to read this. Posted early to HN. Has hitsory of Multi Touch development. As of 1998/1999.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448186

tedunangst2• 14 years ago

The difference is AT&T has several patents covering blit. Harder to sue someone for stealing your idea when they own the patent, not you. [revised wording]

chmod775• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

tedunangst2• 14 years ago

AT&T actually did go around suing various graphics vendors.

alayne• 14 years ago

The pinch to zoom patent is for single vs multitouch gestures on a touch screen. What Krueger is demonstrating is not a touch screen.

marklindhout• 14 years ago

Does anybody else see why such patents are curbing innovation? I mean, the whole difference is a moot point.

cma• 14 years ago

The patents didn't cover the touch screen sensors. The sensors and their drivers--not covered--just give you points corresponding to fingers and pressure. The same thing with this touch table.

You could take the exact same software written for the touch table and feed it the touch sensor (again, not patented) input. Under the ruling this would be found to infringe.

Think about that. Software written before the patent in question fed data from a different device--infringement. It would be like me filing a patent for elements of the standard desktop gui running on an LCD instead of a CRT, and suddenly getting a free pass against all prior-art.

simonh2• 14 years ago

Development of the Lisa started in 1978 and it was released in 1983. The Blit was started in 1981 and released as the 5620 in 1984, the same year as the Mac.

So unfortunately the facts render your sarcasm rather hollow.

Anyway, the Blit doesn't infringe on Apple as it doesn't include any of the things Apple did genuinely develop independently - like pull-down menus, resizable and moveable windows, overlapping windows, directly manipulatable file and document names, desk accessories, control panels, internationalisation, multiple views of the file system and drag and drop file manipulation. So in comparison to Apple tech of the time it's so primitive it wouldn't be worth it anyway.

jvm• 14 years ago

I'm fairly confident that many (most?) of the gui elements you listed were invented by Xerox and willfully copied by Apple. Certainly stacking resizable movable windows, pull-down menus, and manipulable desktop items.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star

saddino• 14 years ago

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").

CurtHagenlocher• 14 years ago

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.

rafitorres• 14 years ago

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

Maakuth• 14 years ago

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)

anujkk• 14 years ago

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

noamsml• 14 years ago

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.

stox3• 14 years ago

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.

stox3• 14 years ago

I miss gebaca.

luriel• 14 years ago

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/

keithpeter• 14 years ago

"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...

nameuserc• 14 years ago

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.

Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982

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