[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[Michael Sokolov]

Kenneth Stailey <kstailey at yahoo.com> wrote:

> When I purchased my copy of _The
> CSRG Archives_ CDROM set I was told in E-mail by McKusick that I did not need
> to sign any license agreements.  I am assuming that this is due to Caldera
> proclaiming that V32 sources and binaries could be redistributed by the public
> legally.

Yes, this is correct, this is the same reason why Warren was able to remove the
password system from his UNIX Archive and make it completely open.

> In the CDROM set is a fully encumbered 4.4BSD source tree which
> includes the learn(1) source code.

Yup, I have it too (the whole CD-ROM set).  learn(1) is far older than 4.4BSD
though, and goes way back.  4.3BSD-Quasijarus has it too.

> I also have yet to
> get the vi lesson data which the source code that I do have says came on a
> separate user-contributed tape.

I just looked and 4.3BSD-Quasijarus has the vi lesson data as part of the
standard system.

> I got here because I have newbies in my life now and I need UNIX online
> courseware.

Hear hear.  I sometimes get into this situation too, usually when dating and
getting faced with the need to teach a prospective female how to use a real
operating system, since the one woman who finally makes it would absolutely
have to use 4.3BSD-Quasijarus on my VAXen.

I looked into learn, but one thing it disappointed me with is that it's
woefully outdated.  It starts by setting the tty erase and kill chars to '#'
and '@' respectively and teaching you how to edit the command line on a
hardcopy tty.  Well, OK, some would see this as good educational value, but the
problem is, if you don't actually *have* a hardcopy tty, and most of us don't,
it doesn't work too well.  It prints out lessons longer than 24 lines and they
scroll off the top of the VT terminal.  It was definitely written with the
assumption that one has a hardcopy tty with a long roll of continuous paper,
and it expects the student to grab the paper coming out of the teletype and
look at what's been printed, but it just doesn't work on a VT terminal.  Not to
mention that in the end the lessons give the student little practical learning
that would actually be useful when using UNIX on a CRT terminal.  (For example,
it would be very practical to explain to the student the difference between ^H
and ^? and teach him/her how to deal with it.)

> I'm wondering about distributing the results of my porting effort once it
> matures enough to be worth doing so.

Well, as a I said 4.3BSD-Quasijarus contains learn and all other "encumbered
code" and it is freely available via anonymous FTP from ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG,
so...  BTW for those who missed it I released 4.3-QJ0b on 2003-12-07.

MS

[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[Kenneth Stailey]

--- Michael Sokolov <msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG> wrote:
> Kenneth Stailey <kstailey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > When I purchased my copy of _The CSRG Archives_ CDROM set I was
> > told in E-mail by McKusick that I did not need> > to sign any
> > license agreements.  I am assuming that this is due to Caldera
> > proclaiming that V32 sources and binaries could be redistributed
> > by the public legally.
> 
> Yes, this is correct, this is the same reason why Warren was able to
> remove the password system from his UNIX Archive and make it
> completely open.

Warren, I see that there is a 4.4BSD-Alpha subdir in the TUHS archive.  Do you
want a final CSRG 4.4BSD tape to add there too?

> > I also have yet to get the vi lesson data which the source code
> > that I do have says came on a separate user-contributed tape.
>
> I just looked and 4.3BSD-Quasijarus has the vi lesson data as part of the
> standard system.

Thanks, I have to go through your archive for it now.

> > I got here because I have newbies in my life now and I need UNIX
> > online courseware.
>
> Hear hear.  I sometimes get into this situation too, usually when
> dating and getting faced with the need to teach a prospective female
> how to use a real operating system, since the one woman who finally
> makes it would absolutely have to use 4.3BSD-Quasijarus on my VAXen.

Oh, I was talking about co-workers.  There's been so many layoffs where I work
that I was hoping to get some more help.

> I looked into learn, but one thing it disappointed me with is that
> it's woefully outdated.  It starts by setting the tty erase and kill
> chars to '#' and '@' respectively and teaching you how to edit the
> command line on a hardcopy tty.  Well, OK, some would see this as
> good educational value, but the problem is, if you don't actually
> *have* a hardcopy tty, and most of us don't, it doesn't work too
> well.  It prints out lessons longer than 24 lines and they scroll
> off the top of the VT terminal.  It was definitely written with the
> assumption that one has a hardcopy tty with a long roll of
> continuous paper, and it expects the student to grab the paper
> coming out of the teletype and look at what's been printed, but it
> just doesn't work on a VT terminal.  Not to mention that in the end
> the lessons give the student little practical learning that would
> actually be useful when using UNIX on a CRT terminal.  (For example,
> it would be very practical to explain to the student the difference
> between ^H and ^? and teach him/her how to deal with it.)

It's so difficult being you.  I was able to save myself the time by
using the 4.4BSD version of learn(1) since it has already been
modified for CRT terminals.  You will have to re-invent the wheel
because of your politics.

> > I'm wondering about distributing the results of my porting effort
> > once it matures enough to be worth doing so.
>
>
> Well, as a I said 4.3BSD-Quasijarus contains learn and all other
> "encumbered code" and it is freely available via anonymous FTP from
> ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG, so...  BTW for those who missed it I released
> 4.3-QJ0b on 2003-12-07.

Thanks again.  I really do appreciate all the work you have done in this area.

> MS


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[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[José R. Valverde]

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Learn is free. At least it's author, some unherad of guy named Brian 
Kernighan is making it publicly available on the Net through his
web page :-)

	http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/

It's been there for a long while.

I had a similar problem with novice users some years ago, and remembered
good old faithful 'learn' from Ultrix. I also remembered having compiled
it at some point in OSF/1. So I went to the net and started a search, and
lo! there it was at Brian's page.

I ported it to IRIX, which is where I had said novice users, and being at
it, to Linux as well. I must have the ported code somewhere but I'm on
Holidays now.

A look at AIX and Tru64 revealed it is still there in new versions of these,
which proved great for me: DWK code did not come with all the lessons I had
used before, and I could just copy the lessons from these systems over and 
use them with the port.

Therefore, yes, it is free, it is available on the Net, I have already ported
it to modern systems, and the lessons are still distributed with
some commercial UNIX variants should you need them.

				j
-- 
	These opinions are mine and only mine. Hey man, I saw them first!

			    José R. Valverde

	De nada sirve la Inteligencia Artificial cuando falta la Natural

[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[Seth Morabito]

On Jan 2, 2004, at 8:53 PM, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> Here is the acid test: time-teleport a V7 user from 1979 to a VAX 
> running
> 4.3BSD, set PATH=/bin:/usr/bin (no /usr/ucb), do stty old (old tty 
> driver) and
> stty ek (erase # kill @) and see if he feels at home or not.

I suspect they would be horrified that more progress hadn't been made 
in computing environments in the last 25 years :)

In 1979, I was pretty excited when I thought about what computers could 
be like in the early 2000s.  We all love to preserve history, but 
there's something to be said for moving on and creating something new 
as well.

-Seth

[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[Michael Sokolov]

norman at nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson) wrote:

> You mean you've restored the original version of cat that had only one option,
> [...]

Notice my use of the words "nearly" and "almost" in the part you responded to.

Seriously though, you gotta agree that until 4.3BSD inclusive, Berkeley was
basically adding to and extending V7.  Sure they added a *lot* and extended
many of the existing facilities, but with very few exceptions, it was all
additive, virtually no V7 facility (except the mpx you mentioned) was removed.
Yes, they added fsck, but icheck is still there!  (No one uses it of course,
but knowing that nobody removed it gives a warm fuzzy feeling.)  The same goes
for almost everything else.

Here is the acid test: time-teleport a V7 user from 1979 to a VAX running
4.3BSD, set PATH=/bin:/usr/bin (no /usr/ucb), do stty old (old tty driver) and
stty ek (erase # kill @) and see if he feels at home or not.

Of course I never use my systems in this way, I make extensive use of Berkeley
UNIX facilities, but I like it much better to use a system that is additive
rather than substitutive with respect to Original UNIX.

MS

[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[Norman Wilson]

Michael Sokolov:

  It feels so great knowing that my current modern OS (last release
  2003-12-07 counts as current and modern to me) still has nearly all original V7
  UNIX code almost completely untouched.  It's what gives me the right to call it
  UNIX.

=======

You mean you've restored the original version of cat that had only one option,
and the version of ls that had fewer than a dozen and didn't care how wide
the screen was; that filenames are only 14 characters long; that fsck has
been abolished in favour of icheck and ncheck and dcheck; and that file system
blocks have returned to their original V7 size of 512 bytes?

My hat's off to you if so.

On the other hand, I have to question either your stability or that of your
system if you have reinstated the original V7 code implementing mpx(2).

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(who actually used the old multiplexor once, but had to fix it first!)

[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[Michael Sokolov]

Kenneth Stailey <kstailey at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Warren, I see that there is a 4.4BSD-Alpha subdir in the TUHS archive.  Do you
> want a final CSRG 4.4BSD tape to add there too?

I would definitely want an image of the 4.4BSD tape too!  But I do mean *tape*,
not what's on Kirk's CD-ROM.  I'm talking about a record-for-record image of
the Official Release Master tape.

> Thanks, I have to go through your archive for it now.

Actually I just took a closer look and it has been in the distributed
/usr/lib/learn since 4.3BSD, it was just never added to /usr/src/usr.lib/learn
for some reason (not even in Quasijarus, I probably didn't notice it).  So you
don't have to go through the pain of downloading a dist from Harhan to pull it
out of there, you can just take it from your CD-ROM set.

> It's so difficult being you.

:-)

> I was able to save myself the time by
> using the 4.4BSD version of learn(1) since it has already been
> modified for CRT terminals.  You will have to re-invent the wheel
> because of your politics.

Well I'll take a look at what they did to learn in 4.4BSD and see if any of it
is acceptable for Quasijarus.  Hopefully I won't have to reinvent the wheel.
I believe in adding new features without breaking or disturbing historical
stuff.  It feels so great knowing that my current modern OS (last release
2003-12-07 counts as current and modern to me) still has nearly all original V7
UNIX code almost completely untouched.  It's what gives me the right to call it
UNIX.

As far as learn goes I think I would need to add new lessons for UNIX on a CRT
or some options or somesuch, but I do NOT want to remove the facility for
teaching UNIX on a hardcopy tty.  That's such a gem, it should be kept!

MS

[TUHS] is learn(1) free now?

[Kenneth Stailey]

Hi,

When 4.4BSD-lite was released one of the 4.4BSD encumbered things that was cut
was the online courseware program, learn(1).  When I purchased my copy of _The
CSRG Archives_ CDROM set I was told in E-mail by McKusick that I did not need
to sign any license agreements.  I am assuming that this is due to Caldera
proclaiming that V32 sources and binaries could be redistributed by the public
legally.  In the CDROM set is a fully encumbered 4.4BSD source tree which
includes the learn(1) source code.  I spent a few hours last night porting it
to NetBSD and FreeBSD and tightening up a few bits like gets() vs. fgets().  I
haven't finished and have yet to distributed the results.  I also have yet to
get the vi lesson data which the source code that I do have says came on a
separate user-contributed tape.

I got here because I have newbies in my life now and I need UNIX online
courseware.  The only thing I could find in the FreeBSD ports tree was
something called vilearn.

I'm wondering about distributing the results of my porting effort once it
matures enough to be worth doing so.

Thanks,
Ken


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