[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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