| From: Russell Reiter via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | These days people can laugh at the UNIX concept of connecting typewriters | but in the lexicon of the 60's the typewriter was the person and the | typwriting machine was the compositing device. Not in the 1960's. Perhaps in the 1860's. In the 1960's I had a typewriter. And it wasn't a human (slaves had been emancipated; actually before 1860 in Upper Canada). And we didn't think of typewriters as doing compositing. If you did it, you did it with a board and with wax as temporary glue (but ordinary people didn't do that). I'm pretty sure that they used the word "typewriter" since "Teletype" was and is a registered trademark of Teletype Corporation (registered 1916) (now called Teletype LLC). If I remember correctly, at the time, Teletype Corporation was owned by ATT. Under US trademark law, if the owner of a trademark allows the name to be widely used generically, they lose the trademark. Think "Aspirin" (no longer protected in US but still Bayer's in Canada, I think). At the time, UNIX seemed to call the devices TTYs. Generically. The industry called them "terminals", but that's a terrible name. It kind of means "endpoint of a circuit". But then a lineprinter, a papertape reader, a lamp could all be called terminals. "Typewriter" was a pretty good term. Ordinary folks knew what a typewriter was. Originally UNIX ran on the DEC PDP-7 and then PDP-11. They came with a real Teletype model 33 or 35. Horrible but amazing (supposedly a design based on a German WWII device; no machined parts!). I managed to get UNIX to support an IBM 2741, which was an IBM Selectric typewriter with a serial connection. This was not easy since the 2741 used a totally different character set ("tilt rotate code") and was half-duplex on a line-of-text basis. When CRT terminals came in, there was a struggle for naming them (not to mention architecting them): - glass TTYs - VDU (Video Display Unit) - [CRT] terminal <== the winner in my world | Unix is dead and all thats left is Linux and some rounding errors. & Ask | grampa about getty. MacOS and offshoots are somewhat UNIX and quite widespread. But, sadly, his point is valid.