I feel just a little bit stupid for not figuring them out sooner, but smart in
being able to figure them out on my own.
Some of you may remember a post I wrote some time ago, dealing with E11
(Ersatz-11) and the RL02 v7 image. I mentioned not being able to get out of
single-user mode, and being unable to view man pages.
Well, as it turns out, I stumbled across the method of getting to multi-user
mode. ^D, imagine that. Dropping out of single-user mode starts multi-user
mode. That's not something I would have been able to use logic to figure out.
And, well, I happened to notice that there was no temp directory, so no wonder
man couldn't create its temp file. A quick little 'mkdir tmp' and that
problem was fixed. Now, that was something I was able to figure out
logically.
Of course, now my problem is that the console is presumed to be a TTY and not
a CRT terminal. And so, man pages just scroll right up and off the screen. Oh
well. I'm sure I'll figure out something. Eventually.
>
> I was not expecting termcap or curses; I was.. *hoping* (still not expecting)
> that perhaps v7 was new enough that the 'simple' type of CRT terminals, the
> ones that were basically just glass TTYs, were in common use. That it would
> be possible to use stty to set the number of rows to n, and that just maybe
> there would be a 'more' command that would only printout the next n lines.
> You know, simple stuff. Nothing about cursor addressable displays, no special
> codes for clearing the screen, or text attributes, just screen paging. At any
> rate, I may sit down at some point and write a 'more' utility of my own. Not
> that I need it for man pages now that I have the offline version of the
> manual, but there are still things like long directory listings that it would
> be useful for.
Actually, termcap and vi was ported back to V7 very early in the piece,
though you needed an ID space processor (aka PDP11/45/50/55/70) to run vi.
There were several paging programs about, some using termcap. From memory
there was dis, pg and more. The man command didn't do any pagination
Cheers
John
Hi Everyone,
I'm having a bit of fun getting P11 up on redhat. Has anyone got a copy
of AS11 that they could send me as I want to rebuild everything
including the boot rom to make sure that I've got it as right as I can.
Cheers
Robin
--
Robin Birch
> Unfortunately the autoconfig stuff has /unix hard coded into
> it and will only look for this file.
Thanks, guys, for the answer. I've got to admit that I'm disappointed.
If you have to decide, before the old system goes down, via a series of
moves or copies or hard links or whatever, which kernel you're going to use
the next time the system comes up, then it doesn't seem all that useful.
I guess if I build a kernel that just doesn't work at all, I can always
boot the old kernel far enough to get to single user mode where I can remove
the dud /unix, put the old one back, and then reboot. That's something.
Anyway, if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is :-) Thanks
again.
Bob
Hello,
I'm interested in acquring an AT&T 3b2 computer. One of these systems
used to run a famous public UNIX system "killer". They also run #5ess
telephone switches, however the OS is different in that case
(DMERT/UNIX-RTR instead of whatever the consumer-level 3b2 runs).
If anyone has information on where to acquire these (I saw the recent
discussion on 3b1s and I know they are more prolific than 3b2s-- infact
a friend of mine used to have a UNIX PC which we set up a BBS on).
Thanks.
Jonathan Stuart, CISSP /"\ ASCII Ribbon
Software Engineer \ / Campaign
Pegasus Solutions, Inc. X against HTML
/ \ email & vCards
I was wondering how I can turn the provided TAR files of 2.9BSD into a
proper tape image for use with an emulator? Is a premade emu-friendly
install tape available? I don't have either a real '11 or a physical
tape drive on my computer?
Hi, all!
I just dug into sed.h from 32V version of sed:
gcc can't parse the following code:
union reptr {
struct reptr1 {
char *ad1;
char *ad2;
char *re1;
char *rhs;
FILE *fcode;
char command;
char gfl;
char pfl;
char inar;
char negfl;
};
struct reptr2 {
char *ad1;
char *ad2;
union reptr *lb1;
char *rhs;
FILE *fcode;
char command;
char gfl;
char pfl;
char inar;
char negfl;
};
} ptrspace[PTRSIZE], *rep;
Does anyone know current form of that, or how to force this
to compile and work?
Thanks a lot!
S.
> If I remember correctly, all of the "real" members of the 3B family
> (i.e. 3B2, 3B5, 3B15 and 3B20) shared a common "virtual"
> instruction set called (I think) IS25 - it was the job of the assembler
> to translate IS25 into the actual machine code for the specific
> processor used in each machine.
> IS25 was a little curious because it only defined those instructions
> that were likely to be of use to the C compiler - thus there was a
> "push" instruction so that the compiler could push function arguments
> onto the stack, but no "pop" instruction because the C compiler
> never generated it.
IS25: just so. I managed to retrieve the scanned PDF for
the manual for this virtual instruction set. It's an
internal memo, but I'll send it if anyone asks. It's
2.8MB of page images and is 108 pages long.
The memories of Lindsly and Lowenstein are also apposite.
AT&T donated quite a few machines (3B20 and 3B2) to universities,
and though they appreciated the thought, there were
various drawbacks--the gift didn't include maintenance, for
example.
Dennis
Duncan Anderson asks:
> Thanks for that bit of information. I had been under the impression that it
> was V3. Is the lack of streams the main difference between the 2 and 3? If
> there is no streams interface, can the machine be part of a TCP/IP network?
SVR3 also added shared libraries and RFS. As for TCP/IP the popular
implementation was from Wollongong. But wouldn't you need ethernet
hardware support too? It's been a long time but I only remember
StarLAN hardware for it.
> I'm interested in acquring an AT&T 3b2 computer. One of these systems
> used to run a famous public UNIX system "killer". They also run #5ess
> telephone switches, however the OS is different in that case
> (DMERT/UNIX-RTR instead of whatever the consumer-level 3b2 runs).
> If anyone has information on where to acquire these (I saw the recent
> discussion on 3b1s and I know they are more prolific than 3b2s-- infact
> a friend of mine used to have a UNIX PC which we set up a BBS on).
The 3B2 was not the same machine as the one in 5ESS, which
was/is the 3B20D, a fairly large duplexed machine (two processors
that mutually checked each other). The 3B2 was a desktop.
The 3B20D wasn't sold commercially, as far as I know. There
was a 3B20S (multi-cabinet) that at least nominally
was commercially available.
Their ISAs were not quite the same, but some assembler language
tricks made the assembler-level languages look quite similar.
Dennis
