From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Tue, 15 May 2018 13:49:26 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Who used *ROFF? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 14 May 2018 19:22:58 -0700." <201805150222.w4F2Mwnn004038@darkstar.fourwinds.com> References: <20180512110127.0B81418C08E@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20180515020611.5A16F156E7DB@mail.bitblocks.com> <201805150222.w4F2Mwnn004038@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: <20180515204933.B4D3A157419B@mail.bitblocks.com> On Mon, 14 May 2018 19:22:58 -0700 Jon Steinhart wrote: Jon Steinhart writes: > Bakul Shah writes: > > On Tue, 15 May 2018 11:21:22 +1000 Dave Horsfall wrote: > > Dave Horsfall writes: > > > On Sat, 12 May 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > > > > > > I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point. > > > > > > I boss I used to work for insisted that we all learn "ed", because one day > > > it might be the only editor available to you; well, one day he was right, > > > when /usr on a client's box got creamed after a head crash... > > > > Your boss must've been an optimist. > > > > I once had to rescue a system where the root dir block was > > lost. No ed. Luckily our bootrom had commands for peek/poke > > & disk block IO. The v7 filesystem layout was simple enough > > and I remembered enough of it that I was able to patch it > > enough to bring it up and run fsck. > > If we're gonna get into "when I was young" stories we need to get > back to repairing filesystems from the front panel switches. :-) My point was when Murphy's Law strikes, you can't rely having even "ed". And it did strike us at a bad time -- 24 hours before our flight to Las Vegas (for Comdex) where we wanted to show off our *only* working prototype computer. As for entering stuff from the front panel switches, my first boss in Silicon Valley had told me that as a postdoc he had entered an experimental *compiler* through the front panel switches on a Minsk-2! I never got around to asking him for the details though. [Minsk-2 was a discrete transistor Russian computer, with 4K of 37 bit words. I/O via paper tape.]