[TUHS] Question about finding curses to build on v7

Mary Ann Horton Gmail mah at mhorton.net
Wed Jun 12 01:48:45 AEST 2019


Termcap and termlib from 2BSD should work fine on standard V6/V7 - 
that's what they were originally written for.  You don't need curses for 
vi or emacs, they have their own comparable code internally.  In fact, 
the original 2BSD curses from Ken Arnold was basically the vi code 
pulled out into a separate library.

Warren Montgomery's emacs was internal to Bell Labs and intended for 
Bell Labs versions of PDP-11 UNIX, not 2BSD, although I recall it was 
often ported to the Vax. I can't recall which version of UNIX they ran 
in the various Computer Centers in the early 1980s when this happened, 
but I doubt it was V7; probably PWB or UNIX/TS. It would have had the 
Ritchie C compiler. I can't recall if it used termcap or had the 
terminals hardcoded - apparently both, according to this:

https://tech-insider.org/unix/research/1983/0119.html

     Mary Ann

On 6/11/19 6:43 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Two more thoughts...
>
> 1.) Zimmerman EMACS (a.k.a. CCA EMACS) ran on the PDP-11 originally 
> when Steve wrote it at MIT.  It's the closest to the original 
> ITS/PDP-10 emacs of all the originals that I knew.    I'm pretty sure 
> he converted it to Pavel's freely available terminfo implementation at 
> some point (when he was at Masscomp), but I think the original 
> Zimmerman code has screwed down terminal support to a couple of 
> terminals that were used at MIT.   I've lost track of Steve, but I'll 
> see if I can find you an email by reaching out on an Alumni list.
>
> 2.) I believe the first (joy created) termcap was in 2BSD but I don't 
> think Arnold and Horton had started to pull the curses library out of 
> vi yet.  I think termcap itself had been but Mary Ann would be more 
> authoritative than I.  Check out the 2BSD, 3BSD, and 4BSD releases and 
> look for the earliest versions.   The C compiler is pretty much the 
> same in all cases (the only issue I can think is that by 3BSD folks at 
> UCB had removed dmr's 7 character variable limit), but I think curses 
> should compile without too much issue on a virgin dmr V7 compiler.
>>
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 8:20 AM <ron at ronnatalie.com 
> <mailto:ron at ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
>
>     The other early "emacs" we ran before switching to gosmacs was
>     JOVE--Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs.
>
>
>
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