Comment by rebootthesystem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rebootthesystem | Hacker News Reader

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rebootthesystem

Having actually used "dumb terminals", like the DEC VT-100, Qume QVT-101 and others over RS-232 connections and shoe-box sized modems way back in the 80's I found the start of your comment to be somewhat funny.

Not criticizing your post at all. Simply making the observation that what we might call a "dumb terminal" today is a million miles away from where this term originated. Just like the "film industry" is really the "digital image industry" today.

I remember running AutoCAD 1.2 on an 8086-based S-100 CP/M system with the addition of an 8087 match co-processor card, 640K of RAM, 1 MB on a RAMDISK card, a tablet with a puck that used a magnetic coil to sense position and, yes, a DEC VT-100 "dumb terminal". Sometimes I had to unload stuff from memory just to be able to plot. Fun times. Funny that today developers think stuff like vim is cool. We couldn't wait to get off those damn terminals and use "real" editors.

Who knows what Ctrl-K-X belongs to?

Having actually used "dumb terminals", like the DEC VT-100, Qume QVT-101 and others over RS-232 connections and shoe-box sized modems way back in the 80's I found the start of your comment to be somewhat funny.

Back in those terminals' heyday, they were "smart" terminals! Dumb terminals could handle text output (sometimes to paper), but had few if any control codes and certainly not the extensive VT100 escape-code set for cursor control, formatting such as bold or underline, etc.

Who knows what Ctrl-K-X belongs to?

WordStar! And joe.

> Who knows what Ctrl-K-X belongs to?

WordStar?

GRRM's favorite word processor.

Yup.

You don't have to know, it's permanently burned into the screen.

How did you see the drawing? I had a VT-100, but they typically could not display graphics.

AutoCAD used a separate monitor connected directly to an S-100 graphics card. You'd enter commands into the AutoCAD command line interface and do the drafting on the graphics monitor.

That also explains the way ACAD works. Had the program been created in the post-terminal age it is likely it would have been a point-and-click application, like, say, SolidWorks. Instead, they relied on commands such as "line", "circle", "pline", etc. typed into the console. You could also type the parameters rather than clicking around.

ACAD also came with a version of Lisp (AutoLISP) you could use to extend its capabilities. In general terms the approach was to use AutoLISP to create a DSL that made drafting much easier for your particular application.

For example, I had a set of programs that created a DSL I could use to layout circuit boards more efficiently than through raw command drafting. If I remember correctly, I could type "dip" and my code would ask a series of question to ultimately place a, say, DIP 16 package with certain size pads and holes on the current layer.

The degree of automation one could be achieved through AutoLISP was remarkable.

Ah - that makes sense.

That pattern of cmd driven UI was very common in those days. I think just about every EDA package does that. However, instead of Lisp, they used TCL.

Thanks for sharing this. I think it is always great when people achieve powerful automation.

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