8 Mar
2006
8 Mar
'06
9:27 p.m.
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.
8 Mar
8 Mar
11:15 p.m.
On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 02:27:52PM -0600, Kelli Halliburton wrote:
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.
It's documented in the original V7 installation instructions. Effectively,
you start in single-user mode with a shell attached to the keyboard.
You have to disconnect the keyboard with ctrl-D, which then kills the shell
and starts running /etc/rc.
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.
In V7, everything was a dumb terminal: termcap and curses did not exist yet.
And you were expected to have a paper-based terminal too :)
Cheers,
Warren
11:59 p.m.
On Wednesday 08 March 2006 04:15 pm, Warren Toomey wrote:
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.
On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 02:27:52PM -0600, Kelli
Halliburton wrote:
The site where I got the v7 image was a bit short on instructions. It just had
the RL image. I was stuck trying to read man pages from within the booted
system. However, your message has prompted me to try to dig up the manual. I
have found a set of 3 PDF files, and I have been poking around in them.
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.
It's documented in the original V7 installation instructions. Effectively,
you start in single-user mode with a shell attached to the keyboard.
You have to disconnect the keyboard with ctrl-D, which then kills the shell
and starts running /etc/rc. 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.
In V7, everything was a dumb terminal: termcap and curses did not exist
yet. And you were expected to have a paper-based terminal too :) 
9 Mar
9 Mar
12:01 a.m.
On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 16:59 -0600, Kelli Halliburton wrote:
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.
Of course, you could get the BSD package (1 or 2 ... not 2.x) and
install it. That's how BSD started BTW, things like vi, termcap, more,
etc. were add-ons to v7.
--
TTFN - Guy
The site where I got the v7 image was a bit short on instructions. It just had
the RL image. I was stuck trying to read man pages from within the booted
system. However, your message has prompted me to try to dig up the manual. I
have found a set of 3 PDF files, and I have been poking around in them.
Those will get you a long way.
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.
In V7, everything was a dumb terminal: termcap and curses did not exist
yet. And you were expected to have a paper-based terminal too :) 
12:54 p.m.
> > > 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.
Kernighan and Pike's book `The Unix Programming Environment' has a
program called `p' that was used in the labs when screens became
faster.
> > In V7, everything was a dumb terminal:
termcap and curses did not exist
> > yet. And you were expected to have a paper-based terminal too :)
By 1978 glass ttys were very much in use. The advent of the
microprocessor made smart terminals affordable.
I would suggest that you play with V7 without the Berkeley stuff. It
will add to your experience. You'll be surprised by the productivity
and usefulness of a system that doesn't move the cursor. From 1982
until 1992 I used ed(1) almost exclusively. In the Seventh Edition
you can see the true beauty of the tools approach without them being
obscured by foreign influences.
The whole idea of running these systems, seems to me, id getting the
real experience of living with them. The V7 experience is a wonderful
one. As you explore the system, you'll see ways to do things
elegantly where other systems have added lots of ornimates that
obscure. To get a real feel, run it as most did.
If you want to expericne BSD, then load BSD.
12:22 a.m.
On 08-Mar-2006 Kelli Halliburton wrote:
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.
Depending on the speed of your simulator, you
could perhaps try to stop the output temporarily
with ^S (and restart it with ^Q). Together with
the ability to scroll backwards within the output
window you should be able to read what is coming
out of your simulated system... ;-)
Good luck,
Hellwig
1:02 a.m.
On Wednesday 08 March 2006 05:22 pm, Hellwig.Geisse(a)mni.fh-giessen.de wrote:
Depending on the speed of your simulator, you
could perhaps try to stop the output temporarily
with ^S (and restart it with ^Q). Together with
the ability to scroll backwards within the output
window you should be able to read what is coming
out of your simulated system... ;-)
E11 starts from a DOS box, which would be fine, since you can set the length
of the screen buffer in a DOS box, but it takes over the screen. So the
buffer disappears and the screen becomes only 25 lines long. So the scrolling
backwards trick doesn't work.
As far as speed goes... under Windows 2000, E11's speed is highly variable. I
think, from reading the E11 manual, that it has something to do with disk
caching. I imagine that it's probably much more consistent under DOS, or the
DOS-based versions of Windows.
6:15 a.m.
I have a 7th Edition installation that includes the Berkeley package. The
USB package includes over 60 commands, 'vi' and 'more' are among
them.
There's also a new 'man' that knows about more, so viewing man pages is
done a page at a time. Other than installing the Berkeley bits, adding the
RL02 driver to the kernel and rebuilding df, it should be a fairly close
match to the original distribution tape.
I usually use Bob Supnik's PDP11 emulator. The vanilla emulator works very
well but it's a bit of a CPU hog. On Linux I've been able to tone that down
by adding a nanosleep in the main processing loop.
The distribution is on two 10 megabyte RL02 images. If you would like a copy
of them, let me know and I'll make arrangements to make them available.
Efton
On 3/8/06, Kelli Halliburton <kelli217(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday 08 March 2006 05:22 pm, Hellwig.Geisse(a)mni.fh-giessen.dewrote:
Depending on the speed of your simulator, you
could perhaps try to stop the output temporarily
with ^S (and restart it with ^Q). Together with
the ability to scroll backwards within the output
window you should be able to read what is coming
out of your simulated system... ;-)
E11 starts from a DOS box, which would be fine, since you can set the
length
of the screen buffer in a DOS box, but it takes over the screen. So the
buffer disappears and the screen becomes only 25 lines long. So the
scrolling
backwards trick doesn't work.
As far as speed goes... under Windows 2000, E11's speed is highly
variable. I
think, from reading the E11 manual, that it has something to do with disk
caching. I imagine that it's probably much more consistent under DOS, or
the
DOS-based versions of Windows.
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1:10 p.m.
Hi Efton,
On 09-Mar-2006 Efton Collins wrote:
I have a 7th Edition installation that includes the
Berkeley package.
[..]
The distribution is on two 10 megabyte RL02 images. If you would like a copy
of them, let me know and I'll make arrangements to make them available.
I'm definitely interested. It would be very
kind of you if you could make them available.
Hellwig
6828
days inactive
6829
days old
8 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
Brantley Coile -
Efton Collins -
Guy Sotomayor -
Hellwig.Geisse＠mni.fh-giessen.de -
Kelli Halliburton -
Warren Toomey