[TUHS] pre-more pager?

[Bakul Shah]

> On Nov 8, 2017, at 10:54 AM, Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In looking around the system v7 environment, I don't see a more command anywhere. I downloaded, converted, and attached 1bsd, 2bsd, and finally 3bsd and it was there that I found source for more... 3bsd looks like it's for VAX, not PDP-11, and it doesn't want to compile (looking for some externs that I gather are part of the distro's clib).
> 
> I may jump ship on V7 and head over to 2.9BSD, which, as I understand it, is a V7 with fixes and these kind of additional tools...
> 
> In the meantime, how did folks page through text like man sh and such before more? I know how to view sections of text using sed and ed's ok for paging file text (painful, but workable). I just can't seem to locate the idiomatic way of keeping everything from constantly scrolling out of view! Obviously, this isn't a problem on my mac as terminal works fine, but I like to try to stay in character as a 1970 time traveling unix user :).
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Will
> 
> Sent from my iPhone

Terminals were slow enough that you could hit ^s to stop scrolling
and ^q to continue. At Fortune Systems, when Dave Yost speeded
up serial io to run 9600 baud terminals at full blast, scrolling was
too fast. So then he added “page mode” to the tty line discipline,
where output stopped after N lines until you hit a key. This was nice
as you didn't have to rerun a command that spewed more than a
screenful but could interfere with type ahead.