From uchinews!linac!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!cats.ucsc.edu!haynes Tue Jan 19 17:08:08 CST 1993 Article: 33379 of alt.folklore.computers Path: uchinews!linac!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!cats.ucsc.edu!haynes From: haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (Jim Haynes) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: The first Ink Jet printer? Date: 19 Jan 1993 20:28:04 GMT Organization: University of California; Santa Cruz Lines: 103 Message-ID: <1jho8kINNlv9@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> References: <1993Jan19.153507.2550@news.uiowa.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: hobbes.ucsc.edu Status: R Development on the Teletype Inktronic goes back to 1959 or so. I remember seeing an early demonstration of the principle, probably that year, which was a single nozzle printing on paper tape. There had been some earlier work with a drum printer for the military - at the time it required thyratron tubes and was abandoned due to the cost of the electronics. Similar printers were of course used in computers where the cost wasn't all that significant compared to the cost of the whole machine. By about 1963 there was an 80-column demonstration version of the then- unnamed Inktronic. The printer itself sat atop an imitation rosewood box about a 3-foot cube. This was exhibited to the military. There were other high speed printers on the market or in demonstration models at the time. Aside from the drum printers from the computer business I remember Motorola had one which printed by dot matrix on Teledeltos paper, using a moving stylus head. There were 2 or 3 sets of styli on a belt which ran constantly. The paper moved constantly and the stylus belt was slanted up to the right, so that it could print a horizontal line on the moving paper. Teletype sneered at this sort of thing because of the expensive special paper and the continuous line feed; if you wanted to print a succession of short lines you had to wait for the stylus to rotate around to the beginning of the line again. The Inktronic was rushed into production for a military project, called a high-speed ASR set. It may have been operated at 2400 baud; I don't remember. I do remember lots of anxiety because it seemed there was a person in the factory who could adjust the printers so the printing was readable; but it was taking a lot of this person's time to do it and what would be done in the field? This model Inktronic used a magnetic core memory to hold the dot patterns corresponding to the characters. Development of a commercial Inktronic proceeded following the military version. There were 40 ink nozzles, each one printing two adjacent characters. As someone already noted the ink was pumped through the system; it was also necessary to heat the ink, so the machine had a warmup time. Ink development took a lot of effort from the beginning. The ink had to be fluid enough to break into droplets and be pulled out the nozzles; it had to dry quickly; it had to be waterproof; it had to be conductive; etc. As time went by the project occupied various rooms in the R&D building, and you could tell where it had been by all the purple stains on the floor; you could tell who was working on it by who was wearing purple-stained white lab coats. The commercial printer used a magnetic read-only memory consisting of flexible printed circuit sheets with U-shaped magnetic cores passing through them. For some reason this was developed in great secrecy; no one not working on the project was allowed in the lab where the memory was being developed. What's ironic about the secrecy is that a nearly identical memory was being used by IBM in the System/360 Model 40 computer at the same time. Another of the difficulties was the line feed mechanism. It was desired to advance the paper in one or two character times at most so that the printer could print lines of any length without a delay for line feed. It took a lot of work to get a mechanism that could move a sheet of paper quickly enough without tearing it. About the time the military Inktronic was in production I remember reading that Hewlett-Packard had developed a plotter that worked on the principle of electrostatically deflecting ink droplets. I presume this is what eventually led to the HP line of ink jet printers. HP as I recall used ultrasonics to help get uniform-size droplets out of the nozzle. One of the great problems for Teletype was the need for uniform-size droplets, since different sized droplets would deflect different distances for the same electric field. Teletype never used the ultrasonic technique. I remember someone had calculated some things about the Inktronic and found that the voltage needed for good deflection was perilously close to that which would cause sparks to fly between the electrodes, especially if any lint built up in the space. The commercial Inktronic was produced first in a 1200 baud receive-only model and later in a keyboard-send-receive model which as someone noted used a weird modem of the day which transmitted 1200 baud in one direction and 150 in the other. I remember we had one of these and had to do some surgery on a PC board to get it to do 1200 baud in both directions, since we were not using a modem. The KSR model used the same absolutely lousy keyboard that contributed to the failure of the Model 37 and Model 38 low speed machines. This was derived from the lousy Model 32/33 keyboard expanded to upper/lower case ASCII, thus making the keyboard feel all the worse. One of the inherent problems is that Teletype never developed certain key technologies, such as small core or disk buffers. Hence the idea of a single moving ink jet head never was considered. It was only in the Model 40 chain printer and the Model 43 dot matrix machine that modern electronics permitted a lot of storage cheap enough to be attractive. Someone mentioned the Inktronic maintenance necessitated by dust getting in the ink and deflection electrodes and nozzles. I remember there were various special tools used to clean and adjust these things. For clogged nozzles there was the "aspirator" usually called an "exasperator" that fitted over a nozzle and had a squeeze bulb to push or pull the clog away. -- haynes@cats.ucsc.edu haynes@cats.bitnet "Ya can talk all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was!" "No it aint! But ya gotta know the territory!" Meredith Willson: "The Music Man" From sloppy@mack.rt66.com Sun Feb 26 20:47:02 CST 1995 Article: 92220 of alt.folklore.computers Xref: uchinews alt.folklore.computers:92220 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!news.clark.net!rahul.net!a2i!mack.rt66.com!mack.rt66.com!not-for-mail From: sloppy@mack.rt66.com (John Millington) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: VT100 audio capabilities Date: 25 Feb 1995 12:11:58 -0700 Organization: Engineering International Inc., Public Internet Access Lines: 53 Message-ID: <3invdu$54h@mack.rt66.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: mack.rt66.com Summary: vt100 can play music Keywords: vt100 sound music X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Status: RO Somewhere in the 'Wendy Carlos' thread, someone said something (is this vague enough?) that reminded me of this: A beep (^G) is just the tip of the iceberg of a VT100's audio capabilities. In the early '80s, I was in high school using a PDP-11 (running RSTS/E) with a bunch of VT100s (and a few other things) hooked up to it. All the local hackers had long since committed all the VT100's escape sequences to memory, and we occasionally had fun exploiting some of the machine's bugs to make them do silly things. (One of my favorites was when you'de set up a scrolling region with ESC [x;yr, put double width lines in it with ESC #3, ESC #4, ESC #6, and then tried to scroll. It would really screw up and there was a way, from this point, to make an entire column of 24 cursors appear. But I'm digressing.) One day a young hacker (we called them "munchkins") named David Ruiz (are you out there, Dave?) was experimenting & learning all about the VT100. His terminal suddenly screeched out a continuous beep. Not a series of individual beeps -- this was a single beep of infinite duration, that would not stop until the terminal was turned off. "What the hell did you do?!", I asked, and he showed me. The VT100 has 4 programmable LEDs on the keyboard, and you can turn them on with the ESC [q command. For example, to turn the 2nd LED on, you'de issue ESC [2q. Dave was trying to turn them _all_ on, but his program had a bug that caused an infinite loop. So instead of stopping at LED 4, it kept going. This prompted a huge investigation by all the local hackers. It was discovered that the magic ESC sequence that causes this behavior is ESC [145q Go try it on a real VT100. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! But that's not all. We found out something much more interesting. Try this one: ESC [137q You won't hear anything. But the keyboard repeat rate will shoot up to a ridiculous rate, *way* to fast for typing anything. Now turn on the keyclick. The klicks will repeat at this outrageous rate, and you'll get a *note*. And the best part is that different keys repeat at different rates! The VT100 is capable of playing several different notes, and there was a brief pause in everyone's projects as all the hackers tried their hand at being musicians. Go try this right now, if you can still find a VT100. Yog-Sothoth Neblod Zin, Sloppy Amiga: The last (1985) innovation in personal computers. From uchinews!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!torn!ryelect!elf Tue Jan 5 10:55:24 CST 1993 Article: 32923 of alt.folklore.computers Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Path: uchinews!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!torn!ryelect!elf From: elf@ee.ryerson.ca (luis fernandes) Subject: X folklore Message-ID: <1993Jan5.162815.27594@ee.ryerson.ca> Sender: news@ee.ryerson.ca Nntp-Posting-Host: eccles Organization: Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 16:28:15 GMT Lines: 107 Status: R The following was posted to c.w.x by Jim Fulton. It is reproduced here for anyone who may have missed it, including my aunt Esmarelda in Duluth. The discussion was about the quote: It's a window system named X, not a system named X Window. -- elf@ee.ryerson.ca Post begins: Newsgroups: comp.windows.x From: jim@ncd.COM (Jim Fulton) Subject: Re: Why do people call it X-windowS? Organization: Network Computing Devices, Mountain View, CA Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1993 01:22:21 GMT Lines: 88 I tiny bit of history for this New Year: I think this quote is from either Jim Gettys or Bob Scheifler and can be found in the X(1) man page. Almost. I came up with the quote to help people (who were calling us day in and day out; particularly the press) understand X's preferred name. The folks at ICS then put it on an early T-shirt (I think it might have been for the X Technical Conference of 1989, but I can't recall exactly). I later stuck it into the README files for R3 and R4. The end result has been that just about everyone initially had a preferance has given up. As to why it was called X, as opposed to something else, I believe there were two earlier window systems named W and V that the early X development group drew upon for inspiration and lessons learned. See Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys' book for a more thorough explanation. W was a window system that was originally designed for the V research project at Stanford. The source code was given to MIT to play with and Bob ended up rewriting a good chunk of it. To distinguish the result from it's predecessor, he called his new stuff X. We've rarely let him name anything since. :-) Other arcania (some of which has been posted by Jim Gettys on occasion): o For those who are obsessed with performance, it is interesting or perhaps scary to note that the initial deployment of VS100s (68000-based graphics coprocessors connected to the host via fiber-optic cable) around Project Athena had 2-4 heads off of a VAX 11/750. Yup, I said 750. o The original X demos and window manager were written in the CLU programming language. o Some people actually used Microvax I's running X ... o ... and they even fought over who got to use the spiffy new Microvax IIs. o The first public releases of X (X.V6 in 1985) required a $100 license. It came with a ~30 page Xlib manual. But, it was monochrome only. o I believe the first commercial third party X application was shown at the Autofact trade show in Detroit in November of 1985. It was an MCAE (mechanical computer-aided engineering) from Cognition Inc. and used X.V9 for the demo. Another neat feature of it was that it used a network-transparent protocol between the applications and a user interface management server which handled all of the X interactions. o The first PC/X server was written in 1986 for the PC/AT. It used a Hitachi ACRTC-based high-res card and monitor and a tablet, making it probably one of the more expensive (and heavy :-) 286s around. o Keith Packard, who perhaps has now touched more of the X11 server code than any other single individual, had to be coerced into working on the server. But then, that was probably because the first task was to rewrite the arc code. o The SHAPE extension to X was sketched out on airplane flight back from a SIGGRAPH as a way of saying "I told you so" to the folks who insisted that non-rectangular windows were a critical flaw in X. We all thought they were silly. As with most memories, much of the prehistory of X is fading into oblivion. Probably for the best. :-) Jim %%% overflow headers %%% To: ejw1@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Eric Weidl), stumpf@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Markus Stumpf), dnh@mfltd.co.uk (Des Herriott), jh@efd.lth.se (Joergen Haegg), bernward@moepi.do.open.de (Bernward Averwald), mccoy@gothamcity.jsc.nasa.gov (Daniel J. McCoy), bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral), chrise@atc.boeing.com (Chris Esposito pierce), rlh@ukc.ac.uk (R.L.Hesketh), erik@westworld.esd.sgi.com (Erik Fortune), dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks), william@bourbon.cs.ucla.edu (William Cheng), bvh@cse.unl.edu (Obi-Wan) %%% end overflow headers %%% From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!torn!hermes.acs.ryerson.ca!hermes.acs!elf Tue Jun 21 14:14:07 CDT 1994 Article: 69943 of alt.folklore.computers Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!torn!hermes.acs.ryerson.ca!hermes.acs!elf From: elf@ee.ryerson.ca (luis fernandes) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: [fwd comp.windows.x] The X Window System is 10 years old today! Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers Date: 20 Jun 1994 19:35:33 GMT Organization: Ryerson Polytechnic University Lines: 112 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: gemini.ee.ryerson.ca X-Mailer: VM Version 5.70 (beta) Status: RO >From jg@zorch.crl.dec.com Mon Jun 20 15:33:14 1994 >Path: hermes.acs.ryerson.ca!torn!howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!caen!crl.dec.com!crl.dec.com!jg >From: jg@zorch.crl.dec.com (Jim Gettys) >Newsgroups: comp.windows.x >Subject: The X Window System is 10 years old today! >Followup-To: comp.windows.x, comp.windows.x.apps, comp.windows.x.i386unix >Date: 19 Jun 1994 15:02:38 GMT >Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Cambridge Research Lab >Lines: 99 >Distribution: world >Message-ID: <2u1mme$7ti@quabbin.crl.dec.com> >NNTP-Posting-Host: zorch.crl.dec.com >Keywords: history "X Window System" origin Or at least the first window system called X is 10 years old; X Version 11 is really the third significant design for a window system with the name X. The lineage is: Versions 1-6 Monochrome only, ran on DEC VS100's displays connected to VAXen and VAXstations 1 and 2. Versions 8-10 Dealt with color, for the VAXstation II/GPX. X10 is the first version that saw widespread availability and use on many vendor's systems. Version 11 Redesign for higher performance, more window management styles, extensibility and better graphics capability. There were at least 4 protocol versions during alpha and beta test, but it would have confused small minded people in the world to have incremented the version numbers the way we did before. Versions in X refer to protocol versions, e.g. when your old applications would stop working. Many earlier versions were small, though incompatible changes, that might only require recompilation and/or relinking. The first mail message widely available on X is below: ---------- Return-Path: From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler) Date: 19 Jun 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday) To: window@athena Subject: window system X I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up. We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now actively building applications on X. Anyone else using W should seriously consider switching. This is not the ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C interface is in the works. The three existing applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O interface, and a primitive window manager. There is no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to volunteer? I may get around to it eventually. Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945 first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel free to get in touch. --------- I guess I'll get this out a few hours late today. Oh well. A month or two before this mail message, I remember walking into my office, where my office-mate (Steve Miller) had been debugging some distributed code for system management, as I remember. He had several ascii terminals, between which he had a piece of scotch tape and a sign "Project Athena Window System" hung, to deliberately tweak his office mate. I don't think Steve had any expectation of anything usable so soon... The early history is that an over-eager Digital salesperson had sold VS100's to Bob Scheifler's group at LCS, and we were using VS100's at Project Athena, as the first thing that could be called a "workstation", though VS100's were bitmap displays connected to UNIBUS VAXes. We had W from Paul Asente and Brian Reid of Stanford (Paul had been a summer student at Digital's Western Research Laboratory), but other than some use for graphics, we had not used it much. In May of 1984 we finally received stable firmware for the VS100's, so finally were able to actually make some forward progress; before then, we regarded VS100's as expensive almost boat-anchors. Both Bob and I had played with W, but had not started serious work, though W had been available to us for 6 months or more. The large, significant design changes that distinguished X from W included: 1) asynchronous protocol allowing much higher performance. 2) deletion of structured graphics, and replacement with immediate graphics protocol requests. The genesis occurred while I was off on vacation and away at USENIX. I returned to this mail; furious hacking both at LCS and Athena occurred all summer, and X first saw wide use at Project Athena starting in September of 1984. One amusing historical note; in 1984 MIT did not have a useable TCP/IP campus network; the most (geogrphically) widespread network on campus was CHAOSnet, running its own protocols, which is why the reference to a tape. While we (attempted) to run IP on top of CHAOS, it typically didn't work well enough to actually get significant amounts of data across campus, as Bob was in LCS, and I was in E40. On the appropriate date, I'll post the original protocol specification, for your amusement. Bob showed incipient signs of insanity and produced some... :-). Jim Gettys -- Digital Equipment Corporation Cambridge Research Laboratory