Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982

<i>God</i>, 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&#38;T. They certainly sued the hell out of Microsoft[1], so AT&#38;T must have been lucky.<p>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 :/<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo</a> (skip to 4:32)

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.<p>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.<p>Lilith demo video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc</a><p>Some screenshots &#38; pics: <a href="http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-of-lilith" rel="nofollow">http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-of-lilith</a><p>Cedar demo: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk</a><p>(Smalltalk and Oberon are a bit easier to find and more well-known anyway)

Rob Pike again. Over the years he's done pretty much _everything_.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike</a>

"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)<p>This was pretty revolutionary at the time, but for some reason those lines made me crack up. Also:<p>"Is graphics good for anything other than playing games?" (2:19)<p>The question sounded sort of facetious then as it does now, but for different reasons.

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.

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.

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).

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").

Link doesn't seem to work anymore, here is the same video (I assume) and a the original paper describing the Blit:<p><a href="http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/" rel="nofollow">http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/</a>

Blit (68K ) ==&#62; DMD5620 ( WE32K ) ==&#62; 630MTG (68K) == 730MTG (68K)<p>The 630 was also know as the "Son of a Blit"<p>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.

That was a nice reflection, I was in the military but wanted to be in computers. Great stuff.<p>This one still gets me, Douglas Englebart was building the future of computing in 1968:<p><a href="http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html" rel="nofollow">http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html</a>

Love the music. Kinda reminds me of The Computer Chronicles with Stewart Cheifet: <a href="http://archive.org/details/computerchronicles" rel="nofollow">http://archive.org/details/computerchronicles</a>

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.<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)</a>

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.

"The mouse has three buttons, and the Blit software maintains a convention about what the buttons do."<p><a href="http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf</a><p>RISCOS and Arthur (Acorn Computers, UK) had a three button mouse and the <i>middle</i> button brought up a local menu for the window under the button. I often wondered where that came from...

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.

I had an AT&#38;T 5620 in my dorm room. Didn't use the GUI features at all, but its giant screen was awesome for Emacs.

Ah, the AT&#38;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...

It has been said on HN that Xerox got some pre-IPO Apple stock options so it's all good.<p>Yeah right. By all accounts Steve Jobs was a weasel.<p>Of course, all those accounts could be wrong.

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

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

I miss gebaca.

It's a UNIX system! I know this!