[TUHS] Article on the history of cat(1)

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Wed Nov 14 12:51:18 AEST 2018


On Wed, 14 Nov 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:

>> Hell, I wish I still had that "CSU Tape"; it was Edition 6 with as much 
>> of Edition 7 (and AUSAM) that I could shoe-horn in, such as XON/XOFF 
>> for the TTY driver.  I was known as "Mr Unix 6-1/2" at the time...
>
> Definitely look at the UNSW tapes I have:
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM
> and https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UNSW/
> in case any of these are what you are looking for.

I think I did before, but I confess I didn't spend much time on it.  My 
pride and joy was certainly the rewritten ei.c driver (implementing the 
200-UT batch protocol), and the clever workaround to an egregious KRONOS 
bug where it would get stuck in a POLL/REJECT loop (I merely sent a dummy 
command viz "Q,I" -- discarding the response -- because KRONOS was 
expecting a command instead of the correct REJECT being nothing to send 
from the batch emulator).

At the time, Unix got blamed because the smaller non-Unix /40s (running a 
standalone program) worked fine for some reason; my guess is that it 
implemented the broken protocol somehow.

-- Dave



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