[TUHS] Question about finding curses to build on v7

Erik E. Fair fair at netbsd.org
Tue Jun 11 16:12:05 AEST 2019


Adam,

The emacs you should search for is "Montgomery emacs" written by Warren Montgomery - it ran on PDP-11's under Unix.

The first Unix system I had regular access to and learned on was the UCB Cory Hall PDP-11/70 running 2.8 BSD starting in Winter 1981, but before I learned vi, I'd learned Emacs on TOPS-20 on a DECsystem-20/60 at Stanford during summer school a few years prior, so any emacs was the quick way in for me. I switched because I got tired of having one finger on the CTRL key all day long ...

IIRC, it was a stripped down version as compared to what I now know is "original" Emacs written in TECO macros - no "minibuffer" and some other stuff missing, but it had enough of the "right" keybindings that someone who knew emacs already could make it go.

I'm still in touch with Ken Arnold (we were contemporaries at UCB), and he might be willing to help you make termcap & termlib go on V7 Unix. As I remember that code, it's not that big. It wouldn't surprise me if the NetBSD CVS repository for that code has the original versions.

As for the Unix Hater's Handbook, a long stretch of the chapter on sendmail is an E-mail I sent to the RISKS digest after an E-mail disaster I had to manage at Apple ... I remember being surprised at seeing in the published book, until I saw the footnote directly quoting the permission I gave the authors to publish it. "Oh, yeah ..."


	Erik <fair at clock.org>


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