[TUHS] Teletypes used for early Unix

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 07:18:07AM +0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 29th, 2025 at 6:15 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 10:27:23AM +1000, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> > 
> > > "The remote-batch load absorbs about 5 per cent of the 11/70 and its
> > > residual capacity is used to serve nearly 50 interactive terminals.
> > 
> > 
> > I still remember, fondly (sort of) being in a terminal room with 50+
> > other students all hooked up to a 4MB VAX 780. The fondness was the
> > sort of bonding we all had from pulling all nighters to get stuff to
> > work (this was at UW-Madison, back then it was a hard core hacking
> > school, lots of Sun's kernel group came from Madison, including
> > Rusty (NFS) and Mojo (he wrote the 4.x VM system) and a bunch of
> > others).
> > 
> > The not so fond part was hit ^T over and over again (it gave you
> > a one line PS like output showing load) while your compiled seemed
> > swapped out forever.
> > 
> > The not fondness made me take out one of the very few loans I have had,
> > in 1985ish I borrowed $2000 to buy a Okidata CPM machine, it was a lot
> > slower than the VAX, but all the cycles were mine. I wrote a lot of
> > code on that machine. Including assembler versions of cp, rm, ls,
> > etc, each of which fit in 512 bytes because that was one sector on
> > a floppy disk, I didn't want to wait for more than one sector to
> > load. Fun times. Now my phone is like 10,000x faster and has
> > easily that much more memory.
> > 
> > --lm
> 
> Larry if you don't mind my curiosity, were these UNIX-y utilities sitting on top of and using CP/M services or chomping at the hardware a little more closely?  Or something else?

It's been a long time but I can't imagine I reimplemented the file system
in 512 bytes.  So I must have used something from CP/M.  I didn't have the
chops to redo the file system at that time.  I was still learning OS stuff.

The biggest thing I wrote on that machine was a dial in/terminal emulator/
file transfer tool I called quicknet.  I kinda wish I still had that code,
my memory is that it was very pleasant.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat