Wonderful article, and I really enjoyed rogue. I was first exposed to it when doing a port of BSD to the Data General NOVA and it was part of the distribution.
I would pick one nit with the history though, CRT computer terminals were absolutely considered a "whole screen" output device. This was because IBM had made the 3270 terminal which you could download a form to, the operator could fill it out (without any computer involvement) and then hit 'submit' and have a single transaction get sent to the mainframe.
Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply paperless teletypes, but the majority had some level of 'forms' capability which involved cursor addressing, different character highlights (blinking/underling/bold), and usually some basic box drawing characters. All in the service of allowing a 'fill-in' form that someone could be trained on quickly without having to explain "computers" to them at all. When the computer started up, the terminals would light up showing a form.
In terms of the tree of life for games, I put rogue, Walter Bright's empire, and Civilization (also called empire in some cases) as the roots for so many video games in the game industry.
IBM terminals are a completely different thing than what the popular minicomputer systems had. From what I understand, the 3270 wasn't a simple serial device. IBM had the advantage that they had control of the entire ecosystem, so their hardware and software worked together much like Apple stuff does today.
Minicomputers (and some mainframes) generally used the kind of terminals as described in the article. Those things were everywhere.
Apologies for not being clear, 3270s are VERY different from the terminals that connect to mini-computers and the VT-series from DEC.
That said, the product capability that mini-computers were going after was to replace mainframes, and mainframes had 3270s and they could do this really cool thing. There wasn't anything particularly special about the 3270 terminal controller or the capabilities of the 3270 that couldn't be implemented in an alternative way. For a mini-computer terminal to get a similar customer experience they needed to be more than just paperless teletypes.
That started with the VT05 which was introduced in 1970 and had directly addressable cursor. Replaced by the VT50 in '74 and then the VT52 in '75 when things really started to get cooking. As the DEC-10 and later VAX started being sold to customers instead of them buying an IBM machine things really took off.
I'm sure they do. I've seen 3270s in use in a few places in the last few years. I'm not sure what they use for new designs, though - I don't hear much about the mainframe world from my part of the industry.
> Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply paperless teletypes
Ah yes, the proverbial "glass TTY." There were a few years in the late 1970s where printing terminals (actual Teletypes such as the ASR 33, and matrix printing terminals like the DECwriter) were fading out and "dumb" CRT terminals came in. When I arrived at university in 1980 the computer center was filled with dumb terminals like the ADM-3. There were a few smart terminals (they could run Emacs!) but they were hard to come by.
Within a couple years, though, the dumb terminals were all gone and were replaced by "smart" CRT terminals that had the more sophisticated features. So the lifetime of the glass TTY might have been only 5-10 years.
I would pick one nit with the history though, CRT computer terminals were absolutely considered a "whole screen" output device. This was because IBM had made the 3270 terminal which you could download a form to, the operator could fill it out (without any computer involvement) and then hit 'submit' and have a single transaction get sent to the mainframe.
Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply paperless teletypes, but the majority had some level of 'forms' capability which involved cursor addressing, different character highlights (blinking/underling/bold), and usually some basic box drawing characters. All in the service of allowing a 'fill-in' form that someone could be trained on quickly without having to explain "computers" to them at all. When the computer started up, the terminals would light up showing a form.
In terms of the tree of life for games, I put rogue, Walter Bright's empire, and Civilization (also called empire in some cases) as the roots for so many video games in the game industry.