[TUHS] pre-more pager?

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Thu Nov 9 05:31:27 AEST 2017


The first and second BSD has cr3 "This filter simulates chuck haleys 
cr3, stopping output after each page (22 lines) to wait for a carriage 
return, sending 22 more lines, or a EOF, sending 10 more lines."

>From my Berkeley book in progress:

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
% what about that?

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" }




More information about the TUHS mailing list