[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > the blit and gnot terminals, and I'm wondering--how widespread > were they? The commercialized versions, were many sold? They > look really cool and I'd like to find one to play with... but is my only > chance to drive to Bell Labs and root through their basement?
The 5620 was used at a number of educational institutions, usually with AT&T 3B2 computers. I don't think it was widely used otherwise, but there certainly were some customers (read on). With minor changes, the "xt" protocol could have been a contender with X-Windows, had AT&T/Teletype marketing been on the ball. (The main disadvantage was that graphics apps were compiled for the specific target architecture.) I have an assortment of 5620, 630, and 730 terminals in storage, awaiting time to clean then up and check them out. We used these (5620 and 630) for many years at BRL, and I still kick myself for not hanging onto my rare white-phosphor 630 when I relocated. I found the user interface to be sufficiently superior that I used a 630 as my main interface to Sun workstations, despite the limitation of the 9600 baud RS-232 port. The Blit family needs host support for the multiplexing; otherwise they just act as big dumb terminals (X3.64 features comparable to the VT100). One also needs a downloader for window processes other than the default terminal emulator. (The original version of the 5620 needs to download the window manager also.) http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/5620_faq.html contains a lot of general information about these terminals, and links to the software you need to properly support them. The only missing component is the software generation system for the 68000- based terminals (630, 730), due to licensing restrictions. Maybe somebody could arrange to get that released, since it is of no further commercial value at this point.
