Plan 9, GNOT, 5620 terminals

Are you also using Inferno and Limbo? The last I knew, Rob Pike was still active with Plan 9. Can't you ask him directly since any Plan 9 user ought to be a "close personal friend of ..." :-) Or is all that gone with the Alcatel merger?

I never got to touch Plan 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs It was ramping up just as AT&T IS was ramping down. I adored the names of all the BAD movies and the mascot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenda,_the_Plan_9_Bunny Glenda is the mascot of the distributed operating system Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It was drawn by Renee French ... As Plan 9 is named after the Ed Wood film Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glenda is named after Wood's film Glen or Glenda. I was curious about the "Aleph" language but that was dropped long ago. I agree for the need to better express parallelism in programming instead of just inlines and libraries for threads.

In the late 80s while working on Unix developement at AT&T IS (information systems), the porting base for SVR4.0 was a 3b2/400 (desktop size) and the 5620. But later terminals were better. Citing http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/5620_faq.html The successor to the 5620 was the 630 which came out 1987. The processor changed back to the Motorola 68000 which the developers had wanted all along. Most of the 630 monitors were amber, although white and green monitors were also available. The monitors had a non-interlaced 1024x1024 pixels and did not have slow phosphors. A second RS232 port was included with optional SSI (3270 connectivity) and 512K RAM cards. In 1989 new firmware for the 630 came out and the name was changed to the 730. This firmware supported 3 RS232 ports, LAN cards, built-in 4014 emulator, and enhanced PF-keys. Options to the 730 included the SSI card (which added the 3rd RS-232 port), ISO and TCP LAN cards, and an X-cartridge. The LAN cards supported from 512K to 4Meg of RAM. In 1990, the 730+ came out with a faster 68000, more EPROM space and RAM was moved from the LAN card to the main controller. In 1991, ISDN connectivity was provided to AT&T Bell Labs. Meanwhile, AT&T research came out with a totally new motherboard controller card using the 630 monitor with totally new software (Plan 9) and called it a GNOT. It had a Motorola 68030 as the main processor. What I'm trying to say is that the newer terminals ought to be more desirable since they use parts that you can probably still get and emulate. The 5620 was based on the AT&T WE32000 CPU, which was fun to use at the time (the heart of the companion 3b2) but I fear there's no support for it anymore. A friend has a 5620 but not the games and toolkits (since TOAD is gone: the AT&T toolchest of unsupported software). The windowing software used the "layers" serial line protocol which will also be hard to re-create. Sigh: it was fun running programs that downloaded into the terminal (cip: drawing program for PIC, GEBACA: Get Back At Corporate America: a game where you shoot corporate logos, the clock-of-all-nations with builtin printer driver and keyboard lock ...) If you succeeded in crashing the 5620's monitor, you got a mushroom shaped cloud with the panic message. I still have some of the red dome 5620 bus-mice because they were truly the most comfy mice ever made. I suddenly have renewed interest in making a USB adapter for it. I found the 5620 web page from: http://fixunix.com/plan9/241581-9fans-blit-gnot-portrait-monitors.html