[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Chet Ramey]

On 11/10/17 1:06 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:00:15PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
>> My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was it
>> like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or
>> ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing perspective.
>> What resources did you consult in your early days and what did the workflow
>> look like in practical terms.
> 
> I learned on the VAX, did some PDP-11 assembly but I dunno if I ever 
> ran on one.  Definitely spent a lot of time on 11/750, 11/780 and the 8600.

This almost exactly mirrors my experience, except we moved off the VAX
before the 8600. (And I did my PDP-11 assembly programming on the DEC
PRO-350, DEC's PDP-11-based "personal computer.")

I came from TOPS-20, and I agree that the hardest part was learning the
command names and different behaviors. I read the manuals, a couple of
books (including, ironically as it turned out, Steve Bourne's), a bunch
of various source code, and a lot of unix-wizards discussions.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/