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From: rpw3@amdcad.AMD.COM (rpw3)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: paging in the terminal driver
Message-ID: <19020@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: Fri, 6-Nov-87 23:37:15 EST
Article-I.D.: amdcad.19020
Posted: Fri Nov  6 23:37:15 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Nov-87 04:33:40 EST
References: <573@elxsi.UUCP> <682@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <796@quacky.UUCP> <421@nuchat.UUCP> <918@sugar.UUCP>
Reply-To: rpw3@amdcad.UUCP ()
Organization: [Consultant] San Mateo, CA
Lines: 22
Keywords: output pagination

In article <918@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>TOPS-20 did all sorts of stuff in the terminal driver. Paging, cursor control,
>the whole schmeer. Of course, they also had a seperate CPU for the ttys...

Yes, they did, but that separate CPU (a PDP-11/40) did NOTHING but emulate
an expensive DZ-11 (at least, for local lines). It had a big, fancy, expensive
DMA interface to the PDP-10, but a communications front-end made by a third
party vendor I worked for (DCA) used a lowly DEC PDP-8 and a simple interrupt-
per-character interface (DA10, sort of a "36-bit DR11C"), and got *much*
higher throughputs than the official DEC front-end.

In any case, all of that "stuff in the terminal driver" was in the terminal
driver! ...which was in the PDP-10, not in the front-end.


Rob Warnock
Systems Architecture Consultant

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