Re: [9fans] Early version of Floppy Demo

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020, at 6:50 PM, Skip Tavakkolian wrote:
> Going by memory, assuming aux/vga ran, you should be able to type 8-Alt-1-2 to type 8½
> You should also be able to start acme or sam instead of 8½.

These will probably work, except acme hadn't been invented yet and sam may or may not give an error the first time. (Checked with another demo disk.) You probably do want to start the window system, there is no way to kill the foreground process without it.

I could email a slightly newer demo disk which prompts, "Start the window system? (y/n)". Note that it has more annoyances than 4th edition. For instance, while the down arrow key behaves appropriately, the up arrow key inserts Î. Home inserts Í, End inserts CR. Double-click doesn't select anything in 8½, which is a nuisance when you habitually use send. The grep command does not exist! It does, however, have ftpfs. Useful demo, not useful tool.

I could email a 2nd edition CD-ROM too. It has grep and the source to everything, but it's not a bootable disk. I don't think the demo floppy's kernel has appropriate drivers. (It certainly lacks 9660srv.) The contents of #S are unfamiliar too. The demo floppy lacks a lot of things, such as /dev/drivers and even ns, which hinders exploration. I extracted a bunch of kernels from the CD-ROM in the past, but I couldn't be bothered to figure out how to boot them, much less find which one(s) will mount root from a CD-ROM. I wonder if they'll boot if I tell qemu they're floppy disk images... (tired now)