[TUHS] pre-more pager?

[markwgreen@rogers.com (Mark Green)]

If I recall correctly there was a program called p on v6 unix that served as a pager. I think it was part of the standard distribution and not a local Toronto mod. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 8, 2017, at 2:29 PM, Forrest, Jon <nobozo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 11/8/2017 10:54 AM, Will Senn wrote:
>> Hi,
> 
>> 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 :).
> 
> In the early days of Unix I was told that it wasn't practical to write
> a pager because such a thing would have to run in raw mode in order
> to process single letter commands, such as the space character for
> going on to the next page. Since raw mode introduced a significant amount
> of overhead on already overtaxed machines, it was considered an anti-social
> thing to do.
> 
> In 1977 and 1978 I worked at Ford Aerospace in the group that produced
> KSOS, which was a "secure" version of Unix (I didn't actually work on
> KSOS myself since I didn't have, nor want, a security clearance). Anyway,
> that group used some incredibly expensive HP terminals that contained
> enough local memory to contain most text files, the way we overcame the
> lack of a pager was to cat the file, and then page around in the local
> memory.
> 
> IIRC later versions of Unix added the ability to respond to a specific
> list of single characters without going into raw mode. Of course, that
> didn't help when full-screen editors like vi and the Rand editor came out.
> 
> Cordially,
> Jon Forrest
> 
> 
>