> From: Brian Zick <brian(a)zickzickzick.com>
> The fun of trying to do something in this now novel way is really
> great. I was thinking I might try using it for my email. The
> news-ticker idea also seems great
I suspect you'll find that the charm wears off pretty quickly, if you try and
use it for Real Stuff, day in, and day out. There's a reason this technology
is not used any more! :-)
> I'm really excited that this not only seems possible but nearly in
> reach.
I share you enthusiasm for the fun of computer archaeology. (Thanks to Milo,
I now have an 11/84 that I'm in the process of trying to get up.) Good luck!
Noel
On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon(a)orthanc.ca>
wrote:
>
> On Aug 15, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Brian Zick <brian(a)zickzickzick.com> wrote:
>
> > Would it still be possible today for someone like me to go out, and find
> an old teletype terminal (an old ASR or DECwriter or something), set up a
> phone line and modem and get a roll of paper, and then actually use it to
> connect to other computers?
> >
> > I know it's not really practical today - but is it possible?
>
> Certainly it's possible. Although you would really only be able to do it
> with an ASCII terminal. A DECwriter would work fine. For a Teletype
> beast, you would need to make sure it used ASCII. But lacking lower case,
> I think you would find it too painful to use, even though all the current
> versions of UNIX (and Linux) I'm aware of still seem to support the
> necessary case conversion in the tty drivers.
>
​Hmm. So for a TTY that old there would probably be no option for
lowercase. That does sound a little painful, especially if I wanted to edit
modern programs..​
> Your biggest obstacle might be finding a host machine that still has a
> modem attached that you could dial in to :-)
>
​So perhaps I could simplify it and attach to a machine sitting next to the
TTY - which then in theory could connect to the outside world via the usual
means. I wonder, has anyone tried something like this?
​
> And, of course, everyone KNOWS the entire universe runs in terminals that
> support ANSI escape sequences for colour and cursor positioning. Who needs
> termcap? (I'm looking at you, git. And clang.) So you might find setting
> TERM=dumb isn't quite enough.
>
> Also, ed(1) is a wonderful editor on a hardcopy terminal. Unless you run
> it on Linux, which KNOWS the whole world runs on 24 line terminal windows,
> and therefore ed needs to pause its output.
​I usually use vim, but before learning vim I learned ed and used it for
about a 2 month space for editing config files and things, so that should
hopefully be the easy part. :-)​
Brian Zick
zickzickzick.com
.:/
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> From: Ernesto Celis <ecelis(a)sdf.org>
> I own an USRobotics modem which I've been thinking about connect to the
> home server and use it to dial in to get acces to my shell
Just out of curiousity, what are you going to dial in _with_? :-)
Noel
> From: Brian Zick <brian(a)zickzickzick.com>
> Would it still be possible today for someone like me to go out, and
> find an old teletype terminal (an old ASR or DECwriter or something),
> set up a phone line and modem and get a roll of paper, and then
> actually use it to connect to other computers?
Well, although I used ASR33's for two years (attached to an 11/20 running
RSTS :-), it was a long time ago (I was 15/16 :-), and they aren't something
I _really_ know about, but ... Here are some issues you need to watch out for:
First, I think most Teletypes used what is called '20mA current loop' serial
line electrical interface standard (although some of the later ones could use
'EIA' - the now-usual, although fast disappearing, serial line electrical
interface standard). They are logically (i.e. at the framing level) the same,
but the voltages/etc are different.
The only Teletype I see listed (in a _very_ quick search, don't take this for
gospel) that used EIA is the Model 37. So if you get a Teletype Model 33 or
35, and want to plug it into a computer, either the computer is going to have
to have an _old_ serial line interface (e.g. DL-11A/C, on a PDP-11), or you're
going to have to locate a 20mA/EIA converter (I've never seen such a thing,
but I expect they existed).
And if you want to plug it into a modem... all modems I ever heard of are EIA
(at least, the ones you could plug terminals into - e.g. in most PC modem
cards, the serial interface is entirely internal to the card).
Second, most of those Teletypes were 110 baud (mechanical hardware
limitation).
So that means that first, if you plug into a computer, your serial interface
has to be able to go that slow. Second, if you're dialing up, you need to find
a dial-up port that supports 110 baud. (I would be seriously amazed if any are
left...)
Of course, if you go with a DecWriter, some of these issues go away, but be
careful: some older DecWriters were 20mA too, and the speeds were almost as
slow on many (probably 300 baud, but I don't know much about DecWriters).
Sorry to be so much cold water, but...
As for finding one... I suggest eBay. There's a broken ASR33 there at the
moment - if you're _really_ serious, might be worth buying as a parts
source. But if you wait, I'm pretty sure one will eventually float by...
Noel
Howdy folks -
So I'm mostly a lurker here and love the history and the way things used to
be done. But being born in '91 I pretty much missed all of it, although I
did grow up with 80s machines in the house.
There is one thing that I would love to do, and may seem a curious thing to
most, but I think about it from time to time, and it's enticing. But I'm
not sure where one would get started.
Would it still be possible today for someone like me to go out, and find an
old teletype terminal (an old ASR or DECwriter or something), set up a
phone line and modem and get a roll of paper, and then actually use it to
connect to other computers?
I know it's not really practical today - but is it possible?
Brian Zick
zickzickzick.com
.:/
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On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Friday, August 1, 2014, Dario Niedermann <dnied(a)tiscali.it> wrote:
>
>> Tim Newsham <tim.newsham(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > just for fun, you might want to run your
>> > ancient unix in simh using this terminal:
>> > https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term
>>
>> Cool! I've been waiting for ages for something like the Cathode terminal
>> emulator
>> to appear on Linux too. Cathode is Mac OS X only, unfortunately.
>> Homepage: http://devio.us/~ndr/
>> Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/
>>
>>
> I still prefer my old Digital VT terminal though. Nothing will beat CRT
> screen when it comes to low resolution text-only mode.
>
> --Andy
>
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
>
> From: John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org>
>> if you're dialing up, you need to find a dial-up port that supports
>> 110 baud.
> I dialed up The World's local dialup line for my area, and heard a
> large variety of tones including Bell 103-compatible FSK, which is 300
> baud. I suspect that anything that can do Bell 103 can fall back to
> Bell 101, which was 110 baud.
There are two more things one needs to have for the port to support 110: i)
the serial interface needs to support 110 (even if the modem is integrated
with the serial hardware on one board, the serial hardware might not do 110),
and ii) the software needs to be willing to go 110.
I don't know anything about how contemporary dial-up ports work, so maybe
there's some side-channel from the modem to the interface which allows the
software to find out directly what speed the modem is using. However, 'back in
the day' with multi-speed ports, there was no such mechanism (the RS-232
interface spec didn't provide for speed indication), and one had to hit BREAK
and the serial line device driver would see that, and try the next speed in a
list. You can still see this in the big table of terminal types in getty.c,
e.g.:
/* table '0'-1-2 300,150,110 */
which tried 300, 150, 110. So if the software isn't looking for 110...
Noel
Rats :( :( :(
Did they have power supplies, and did they still work?
On Fri, 15 Aug 2014, Clem Cole wrote:
> Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 17:07:28 -0400
> From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>
> To: Brian Zick <brian(a)zickzickzick.com>
> Cc: "tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Teletype
[...]
>
> Funny, just this AM, I put into the the electronics recycling box at work 4
> telebit "Worldblazer" modems and a POTS line emulator (and a bunch of other
> old junk). I've been clean out my basement and I knew I would never use
> those again.
>
---------------------------------------------
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Doug McIlroy:
The single-token rule meant that, if you wanted to supply an
option to wc in the pipeline
ls > wc >
you couldn't write
ls > wc -l >
as one would expect, but instead had to write
ls > "wc -l" >
Yet a quoted "wc -l" as a bare command or (I suspect) as the
first command in a pipeline would lead to "command not found".
What a mess!
======
Then as now, a quoted "wc -l" would be taken by the shell
to be a single world, so
"wc -l" file
would be a request to find a file named "wc -l" (without
the quotes but with the embedded blank) somewhere in the
search path, and execute it with argv[0] = "wc -l" and
argv[1] = "file". But the shell's parser bound only the
word following > or < to the operator, so the command had
to be quoted (if it had arguments) to make it a single word.
So in the old syntax, if you needed to quote an argument
of a command that was part of a pipeline but not at the
head, you'd have to embed quotes within quotes; e.g.
ls > "grep '[0-9]'" >
Decidedly a quick hack, just like the original implementation
of fork(2) (which was, approximately, swap the current process
out, but keep the in-core copy, and give one of the two a new
process ID and process-table entry). Though unlike the original
fork, the original pipeline syntax was rough enough to be
worth fixing early on.
As a side note, when I was writing my earlier message, I was
going to construct an example using wc -l, until I checked the
manual and discovered that when pipelines were invented wc
didn't yet take options. I also thought about an example
using grep, except grep hadn't appeared yet either. Pipelines
(especially once they were attractive and convenient to use)
made a bigger difference than we remember in how commands
worked and which commands were useful.
And of course Doug gets at least as much credit as Ken for
changing our lives with all that.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
> From: Mark Longridge <cubexyz(a)gmail.com>
> The first problem I had was I couldn't just cp over all the
> /usr/source/s1 files to the new drive because of "Arg list too long"
John Cowan nailed this; as an aside, I don't know about V5, but in vanilla V6
the entire argument list had to fit into one disk buffer (I would assume V5 is
the same).
The PWB changes to v6 included a rewrite of exec() to accumulate the argument
list in swap space, so it could be much longer; the maximum length was a
parameter, NCARGS, which was set to 5120 (10 blocks) by default.
Noel
Since there's a pdf of the unix v5 man pages I figured I might as well
recreate all the necessary files to have man pages in v5.
There's a very simple thompson shell script that I used from v6 to create man:
if X$2 != X"" nroff man0/naa man$1/$2.$1
if X$2 = X"" nroff man0/naa man1/$1.1
I borrowed the assembly language source from v6 to recreate nroff for
v5. After that it was just a matter of matching the date from various
files in v4 and v6. If the date was exactly the same for a given man
page file I just copied it straight into v5. If the date was different
then I used the version in v6 and just edited it until it matched what
was shown in the v5 manual pdf.
It should also help me figure out a lot of the differences between v5
and v6. When it's all done I'll put the disk images and configuration
files on archive.org and post the URL here.
I developed a sort of philosophy for adding stuff to unix v5 which
goes beyond the v5root.tar.gz files donated by Dennis Ritchie:
No changing of cc or as.
No changing of the kernel code beyond recompiling the existing v5 code.
No changing of the existing device drivers (adding new ones is OK).
No backporting of iolib or stdio into v5.
No changing libc.
Adding userland programs is OK as long as the above rules are followed.
Mark
