[TUHS] PWB contributions
Jeremy C. Reed
reed at reedmedia.net
Tue Nov 10 08:23:05 AEST 2015
On Sun, 8 Nov 2015, Clement T. Cole 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.
>From my book in progress ...
-=-=-=-=-=-=
Many students were writing various pieces of software not in the context of
some larger purpose, but for their benefit. They were then included when
Joy
% and company
collected up the existing software and distributed it.\cite{halbert1}
In the Berkeley terminal rooms, the dumb terminals beeped
incessantly so most of the bell speakers had been disconnected.
Their \emph{cr3} pager tool rang the terminal bell and waited for a carriage
return after every 24 lines.
The terminals also rang the bell when the cursor advanced near the
right margin on output or keyboard input (like a typewriter
bell).\cite{halbert-jchac1-4}
% TODO: mention cr3 stty mode?
% archives/1970s/2bsd/src/cr3.c says 22 lines and no mention of sound
So Dan Halbert\index{Halbert, Dan}.
who arrived in 1978 as a first-year graduate student,
wrote a pager called \emph{more} that printed ``--More--''
instead of ringing the bell and accepted the space
instead of carriage return to continue. Plus it could take multiple
filenames and print a line of colons around the filenames.
This was inspired by his use of the ITS timesharing systems as an
undergraduate at MIT that put a ``--MORE--'' prompt at the bottom
of the screen when displaying files.\cite{halbert-jchac1-4}
His friends and fellow graduate students, Geoff
Peck\index{Peck, Geoff} and Eric Shienbrood\index{Shienbrood, Eric},
greatly expanded it, adding various
options -- and \emph{more} was added into the next distribution.\cite{halbert1}
-=-=-=-=-=-=
Date: 17 Jun 2010
@MISC{halbert1,
author = {Dan Halbert},
howpublished = "Personal correspondence",
year = 2010,
month = jun
}
@ARTICLE{halbert-jchac1-4,
author = "Dan Halbert",
title = "{THE "MORE" COMMAND IN UNIX}",
journal = "Journal of the Computer History Association of California",
year = 1994,
month = "April-June",
volume = "1",
number = "4" }
Prior to that Chuck Haley had a pager called cr3. Then Bill Joy
simulated that with a filter "stopping output after each page (22
lines) to wait for a carriage return, sending 22 more lines, or a EOF,
sending 10 more lines." (That quote is from the source.)
By the way, I don't have experience with the CR3 control register, and
don't really understand what it means from the hardware perspective.
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