The Blit Terminal

[JamesD]

Before the Lisa, Mac, Atari ST, Amiga, and Windows... there was Blit.

[mr_me]

Thanks for this, its really interesting. According to Wikipedia the first blit machine was the AT&T 5620 DMD in 1984. And there was the Apple Lisa (1983), Apollo DN100 (1981) and the Xerox Star 8010 (1981). Also according to Wikipedia, Xerox had about 1500 Xerox Alto systems in use at Xerox, universities and government offices in the 1970s.

[+doctorclu]

Wow, that was WAAYYY ahead of it's time. We take a lot of that for granted now.

[JamesD]

According to this, they originally wanted to interface it to the mainframe using a network port, but network hardware was too expensive.
Lots of design info.
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf

Edited August 28, 2016 by JamesD

[JamesD]

I'm guessing Blit stands for Bell Labs Information Terminal or something like that.

Information, interface, Intelligent...

[Opry99er]

Running a 68k processor. Cool. Apple chose well.

[JamesD]

Running a 68k processor. Cool. Apple chose well.

I worked on a UNIX box with a 68010 before the Amiga and ST came out.

Not sure what year it was introduced but the 68K processors were in workstations up until the Lisa... and the Lisa cost just as much I'd guess.