[TUHS] PWB contributions

Win Treese treese at acm.org
Mon Nov 9 12:54:57 AEST 2015


Clem, 

In trying to check on some memories of mine, I came across your answer on
Quora about "What is the difference between less and cat command?”, in which
you mention that Wikipedia had it wrong about Dan Halbert writing more(1).

What Dan did tell me many years ago is that he wrote a program called “less”
when he was at Berkeley as a near-parody on more(1). Its notable feature was
that it went backwards through the file, displaying in the opposite direction.

This, of course, had nothing to do with what we now know as less(1), and that code
is probably lost to history.

 - Win

> On Nov 8, 2015, at 9:12 PM, Clement T. Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> Doug
> 
> Eric Shienbrood originally wrote more(1) at UCB when he came as a grad student.    It was based on functionality from ITS that he as used to having at MIT.   Summit wrote a similar program with the same called page(1) and I'm fairly sure it was few years after Eric's program. Btw page(1) which did not have the same functionality (no termcap or in there case terminfo yet).  Less(1) would show up a few years later and replace them both.  
> 
> Clem
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> On Nov 8, 2015, at 8:39 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
>>>> I thought PWB (makers of "make") came from Harvard?
>> 
>>> PWB ...  came straight out of Bell. Not sure about all the
>>> applications (well, SCCS came from Bell).
>> 
>> PWB did not create make; Stu Feldman did it in research.
>> PWB did make SCCS. I believe it also originated cico,
>> find and eval. Probably more, too, but I can't reliably
>> separate PWB's other contributions from USG's.
>> 
>> Doug
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