14 Oct
2017
14 Oct
'17
2:52 p.m.
From: Will Senn
I didn't know that the delete key served a
purpose, interrupt
At MIT, the PWB1 (effectively) system that was standard at Tech Sq had had its
teletype driver completely re-written by the time I started using it, and that
was changed, so I never saw this IRL.
Recently, I needed a Unix to run under Ersatz-11, to talk to physical QBUS
-11's and download them over their console line, so I went with V6 (since I
had not at that point managed to recover the MIT system). Wow. Talk about
a rude awakening!
That was one of the things that was, ah, problematic - and in V6, there's no
way to change the interrupt character. (And no, I didn't feel like switching
to a later version!)
An even bigger problem was that in vanilla V6, there's _no way_ to do 8-bit
input _and_ output. Sheesh. I managed to fix that too, after a certain amount
of pain. (I missed a code path, or something like that, and it took me quite a
while to figure out why my fixes didn't work.)
Noel