From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: random832@fastmail.com (Random832) Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2017 14:22:44 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] pre-more pager? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1510168964.1261540.1166077456.49865F48@webmail.messagingengine.com> On Wed, Nov 8, 2017, at 13:54, Will Senn wrote: > In the meantime, how did folks page through text like man sh and such > before more? I know how to view sections of text using sed and ed's ok > for paging file text (painful, but workable). I just can't seem to locate > the idiomatic way of keeping everything from constantly scrolling out of > view! Obviously, this isn't a problem on my mac as terminal works fine, > but I like to try to stay in character as a 1970 time traveling unix user > :). Well, in the beginning, there was paper. You didn't need to "page" because you had actual pages you could hold in your hand (if not the manual typeset as an actual book, then the printed output from the teletype). The utility of a 'pager' as such came from the proliferation of CRT terminals. To that extent, using the scroll bar in your terminal to imagine you're going through a roll (well, it was actually fanfold AIUI) of paper may actually be more "in character" than installing a pager. The earliest (mainline BSD, anyway, SRI-NOSC "pg" is dated earlier) pager in the archives is "cr3" in 1BSD - it alludes to the existence of an earlier kernel hack with the same effect (enabled, according to legend, by setting the CR delay in the tty line discipline to mode 3 i.e. "stty cr3"). There are also four different programs in the archive called "pg", all for the same purpose, that appear otherwise unrelated to each other. The OpenSolaris one comes from some version of System V, which is the one that the one available on modern-day Linux is a clone of - the others are of far earlier vintage. Other programs include "more" (naturally) from 3BSD, and "p" (which is very minimalistic, despite using a few V8-specific library features, but V8 isn't in the web-accessible source archive) from Version 8 research unix. Some of these are for V7 or V6 contemporary PDP-11 Unixes, and most of them are far simpler than more so you should have little difficulty getting them working anyway. Links: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/s6/cr3.c http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2BSD/src/cr3.c http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/src/ucb/more.c http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=32V/usr/src/cmd/pg.c http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM/source/S/pg.c (apparently unrelated to the 32V version) http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/s2/pg.c http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/pg/pg.c https://danhalbert.org/more.html - mentions cr3