Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982 | Hacker News Reader

Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982

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157 pointsfogus76 comments

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)

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.

> 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

If that is the case, what about the Jeff Han video which came out in 2006? Jeff Han was obviously working on it for at least a year before he gave that talk. Shouldn't that be obvious prior art? He talks about pinch and much more!

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

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]

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.

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

> Sarcasm on the Internet does not work unless you use <sarcasm> tags!

It works fine:

If I'm sarcastic and you don't get it, it's because you're incompetent at reading.

If you're sarcastic and I don't get it, it's because you're incompetent at writing.

See? Perfect!

Just an example of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Please read this article[0] and educate yourself. The amount of misinformation surrounding the Apple-Xerox relationship is dizzying.

edit: this article[1] is a bit briefer, and provides much of the same information.

[0] http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st...

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

The grandparent to your post says "Apple did genuinely develop independently". Not "Apple did legally license from Xerox in exchange for stock". So the point still stands.

The amount of misinformation surrounding how much of the modern computing experience Apple independently invented is also dizzying.

Xerox Star User Interface (1982) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

Which doesn't have any of the features I listed. e.g. look at those windows - they can't be moved, resized or overlap.

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)

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...

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

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

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

Acme is based on the Oberon system (1985)

Which in turn took quite some influence from Cedar/Mesa at Xerox. But one might as well say that KDE 4.9 (2012) is based on MacOS (1984), that doesn't make it an "early GUI" in my eyes.

Well, that the "modern" part. The interface itself is by Writh, no idea when h published a paper about it, that the "early" part.

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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 :)

"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.

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.

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.

Sorry that was unclear. I was referring to the modern backlash against multitasking. Specifically, I'm sure that I can't think productively about more than one thing at a time.

There's no question that this system was a technological achievement though and that having access to more than one running program at a time is a good thing.

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.

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

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

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

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).

Have you looked at elinks for terminal browsing?

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

Well, if you're not that tied to terminal apps, there's always xombrero, jumanji, dwb or luakit.

(Rob Pike himself is pretty proud that he never wrote a program with cursor addressing, there are definitely differences between modern Linux "minimalist" and proper 9fans)

https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero

http://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/

http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/

http://mason-larobina.github.com/luakit/

I just use vimperator with iceweasel/firefox.

Also worth mentioning, surf: http://surf.suckless.org/

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:

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

"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...

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&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&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...

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

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....

:-)

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

It used the same processor and 'only' twice the RAM.

Even assuming the RAM is the most expensive component, by definition, the materials cost no more than twice the cost of the original Macintosh. (~2500USD in 1984)

Of course, the Blit is just a terminal pulling applications down from a Unix host over the serial port; when you consider that the Blit is just a display, it does indeed seem a bit pricey.

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

I miss gebaca.

It's a UNIX system! I know this!

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