Talk:Getty (Unix)

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Authorship of getty[edit]

Page used to say "getty is a Unix command for controlling terminal settings." I think the original author may have confused this with the 'stty' command.

Is there any evidence that Jim Gettys wrote this? It was in V6 Unix in ~1975. Gettys was at MIT until at least 1974, and I don’t think went to AT&T/Bell immediately afterwards. I think the similar names are just coincidence. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BrianSniffen (talk • contribs) 20:13, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If this is accurate, then it's even older, and dates to 1972. Furthermore, it looks like the functionality of getty was part of init (page 11) in 1971. inclusivedisjunction (talk) 22:03, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I use GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) and there is a man page for getty (https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/v2.36/v2.36-ReleaseNotes), quote:

AUTHORS
      Werner Fink ⟨werner@suse.de⟩
      Karel Zak ⟨kzak@redhat.com⟩
      The  original  agetty  for  serial terminals was written by W.Z. Venema
      <wietse@wzv.win.tue.nl>  and  ported   to   Linux   by   Peter   Orbaek
      <poe@daimi.aau.dk>.

Said that, I think Wietse Zweitze Venema (http://wzv.win.tue.nl/wietse/) is real author! (¿May I upload a screen capture at Commons for that, what do you think about it?) Have a nice day all of you!--Jimmy Olano (talk) 20:08, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, that's agetty(8), not the original getty(8). ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 10:31, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Research UNIX getty was split from init sometime between Version 1 and Version 2. This is a diff detailing much of the change from the perspective of the manuals: https://gitlab.com/segaloco/mandiff/-/commit/7c77187b862930c0b8a5d5d5a2a94090d6952a7b

As was convention in the manuals at the time, the OWNERs are given as Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Joe Ossanna. Convention at the time was to list those personnel who had worked on the component, but OWNER did not necessarily imply original authorship. Init is then listed as owned by Ken and Dennis. This pegs likely authorship of getty to one or both. As such, it is my assertion that getty as described in this article was likely originally authored by Ken Thompson and/or Dennis Ritchie, and that Jim Gettys has no relation to this article whatsoever.

No subsequent getty matters, authorship of agetty from the util-linux package, for instance, is meaningless noise regarding the question of original authorship. 2601:602:900:B670:BCAE:D3DF:87C7:2CC9 (talk) 20:56, 26 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Originally, on traditional Unix systems, getty handled connections to serial terminals (often teletype machines) connected to a host computer."[edit]

Shouldn't it be "handled connections of serial terminals (often teletype machines) on a host computer."? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.245.99.204 (talk) 11:20, 8 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]