From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o)
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2018 21:56:50 -0400
Subject: [COFF] Other OSes?
In-Reply-To: <129a13eb-de93-3d6b-b7b5-d0df13e60c87@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
References: <82df833ae2a587b386b4154fc6051356a3510b19@webmail.yaccman.com>
 <129a13eb-de93-3d6b-b7b5-d0df13e60c87@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
Message-ID: <20180709015650.GA29373@thunk.org>

On Fri, Jul 06, 2018 at 09:38:12AM -0600, Grant Taylor wrote:
> > With the advent of glass teletypes, shell scripts simply evaporated --
> > there was no equivalent.  (yes, there were programs like sed, but it
> > wasn't the same...).  Changing, e.g., a function name oin 10 files got a
> > lot more tedious.
> 
> I don't understand that at all.  How did glass ttys (screens) change what
> people do / did on unix?

I never used Unix on teletypes; when I was using an ASR-35 and a
KSR-33 teletype, it was connected to a PDP-8/i and PDP-15/30, although
both did have a line editor that was very similar to /bin/ed.  (This
is why to this day if I'm on a slow link or am running in a reduced
rescue environment, I fall back to /bin/ed, not /bin/vi --- my finger
macros are more efficient using /bin/ed than /bin/vi.)

At least for me, the huge difference that made a difference to how I
would use a computer primarily had to do with speed that could be sent
from a computer.  So even when using a glass tty, if there was 300 or
1200 bps modem between me and the computer, I would be much more
likely to use editor scripts --- and certainly, I'd be much more
likely to use a line editor than anything curses-oriented, whether
it's vim or emacs.

I'd also be much more thoughtful about figuring out how to carefully
do a global search and replace in a way that wouldn't accidentally
make the wrong change.  Forcing myself to think for a minute or two
about how do clever global search and replaces was well worth it when
there was a super-thin pipe between me and the computer.  These days,
I'll just use emacs's query-replace, which will allow me to approve
each change in context, either for each change, or once I'm confident
that I got the simple-search-and-replace, or regexp-search-and-replace
right, have it do the rest of the changes w/o approval.

> What could / would you do at a shell prompt pre-glass-TTYs that you can't do
> the same now with glass-TTYs?

It's not what you *can't* do with a glass-tty.  It's just that with a
glass-tty, I'm much more likely to rely on incremental searches of my
bash command-line history to execute previous commands, possibly with
some changes, because it's more convenient than firing up an editor
and creating a shell script.

But there have been times, even recently, when I've been stuck behind
a slow link (say, because of a crappy hotel network), where I'll find
myself reverting, at least partially, to my old teletype / 1200 modem
habits.

						- Ted