[TUHS] V6 intro file display in terminal

[TUHS] V6 intro file display in terminal

[Will Senn]

There is a file, intro, in /usr/doc/man/man0, that is a system introduction prepared for a ‘Graphic System phototypesetter... in troff’. I was wondering if there was a way to display the file in v6 on the terminal, similar to displaying man pages:

nroff /usr/doc/man/man0/naa /usr/doc/man/man1/write.1

I couldn’t find a troff command and the output from various nroff incantations were less readable than cat.

Thanks,

Will

Re: [TUHS] V6 intro file display in terminal

[Clem cole]

Will.  You are reliving the experience 👌

IIRC nroff for v6 assumes the output is an ASR37      There are numerous filters such as ul(1) and more(1) that appear in those days that will help make the output more readable but you’ll need to install them.   

Do look at the 1bsd tape as well as the first usenix tape.   You’ll find a lot things that will make v6 a little more sane.   

Also. As you probably have discovered tar was Ken’s creation for Unix/TS (widely distributed in V7) to replace v6’s tp and harvard’s stp.  There is a version of it called v6tar that was released with V7 to help with conversions.   I’m fairly sure Warren has a binary on the archive.    

With that you should be able write things that are easy to move between you simh system and a modern machine.    One other handy trick is creating a copy of Horton’s uuencode/undecode pair.   The sources are in many places (and many languages these days).  I may even have a version I once created to back port it to the v6 compiler.   But you should be able too pretty easily.  The only issue is no stdio but the portable C lib in v6 has everything the encode twins need.  so I expect you can back port it yourself in under an hour.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Dec 29, 2018, at 12:12 PM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> There is a file, intro, in /usr/doc/man/man0, that is a system introduction prepared for a ‘Graphic System phototypesetter... in troff’. I was wondering if there was a way to display the file in v6 on the terminal, similar to displaying man pages:
> 
> nroff /usr/doc/man/man0/naa /usr/doc/man/man1/write.1
> 
> I couldn’t find a troff command and the output from various nroff incantations were less readable than cat.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Will
> 

Re: [TUHS] V6 intro file display in terminal

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 01:06:40PM -0500, Clem cole wrote:
> 
> With that you should be able write things that are easy to move between you simh system and a modern machine.    One other handy trick is creating a copy of Horton???s uuencode/undecode pair.   

If Will can't find uuencode/undecode I can provide C functions that do that.
We rewrote them for BitKeeper.