Timeline for What was the first OS with the type-ahead capability from a dumb terminal?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
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| Mar 8, 2022 at 3:29 | history | edited | dave | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
7.04 monitor internals link
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| Mar 5, 2022 at 19:47 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | RSTS/E also had it. Typeahead on DEC was usually implemented by the terminal device driver (which is part of the OS). | |
| Mar 5, 2022 at 15:34 | comment | added | dave | For MOP, I wonder if the typeahead buffering was in the 7903 communications controller (which was a computer in its own right)? | |
| Mar 5, 2022 at 8:57 | comment | added | cup | The ICL 1900 series had typeahead on their MOP terminals too. No evidence but I remember typing ahead when the program was "thinking" and when it burst into life, it took my replies at the appropriate places. Can't really say whether the feature was there from the start or whether it came out later. | |
| Mar 4, 2022 at 23:08 | comment | added | dave | @WalterMitty - naturally I was only looking at OS documentation. | |
| Mar 4, 2022 at 18:27 | comment | added | Walter Mitty | Very early DEC machines, like the PDP-1, came with no operating system. For that reason, discussion of type ahead would be almost meaningless. And if the hardware supported multiprogramming, it's hard to imagine how it could have worked without either typeahead or locking keyboards. I have a PDP-6 manual somewhere. If I can find it, I'll see whether it says anything relevant to the current topic. | |
| Mar 4, 2022 at 13:18 | history | edited | dave | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 527 characters in body
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| Mar 4, 2022 at 13:08 | comment | added | dave | @WalterMitty - I thought it likely, but couldn't find any statement in the doc, and balked at trying to figure it out from SCNSER. | |
| Mar 4, 2022 at 13:07 | comment | added | dave | I've found it surprisingly difficult to find typeahead mentioned in DEC doc. Maybe it's because as someone else said, it wasn't regarded as a "feature". By contrast, I was surprised when RSX-11M didn't work like that: in general, when you typed an MCR command line, it was executed "now", regardless of whether the last task you started was still running. | |
| Mar 4, 2022 at 13:06 | comment | added | Walter Mitty | AFAIK "The Monitor" on the PDP-6 had typeahead in 1965. The monitor is what later became TOPS-10. | |
| Mar 3, 2022 at 23:49 | comment | added | Leo B. | Sure they did not. I was wondering which system had it before Unix. | |
| Mar 3, 2022 at 23:45 | history | answered | dave | CC BY-SA 4.0 |