From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: chet.ramey@case.edu (Chet Ramey) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2017 14:18:32 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980 In-Reply-To: <20171110180641.GB25370@mcvoy.com> References: <0d7c61c7-7f5a-1854-64c3-737f4de1233c@gmail.com> <20171110180641.GB25370@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On 11/10/17 1:06 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:00:15PM -0600, Will Senn wrote: >> My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was it >> like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or >> ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing perspective. >> What resources did you consult in your early days and what did the workflow >> look like in practical terms. > > I learned on the VAX, did some PDP-11 assembly but I dunno if I ever > ran on one. Definitely spent a lot of time on 11/750, 11/780 and the 8600. This almost exactly mirrors my experience, except we moved off the VAX before the 8600. (And I did my PDP-11 assembly programming on the DEC PRO-350, DEC's PDP-11-based "personal computer.") I came from TOPS-20, and I agree that the hardest part was learning the command names and different behaviors. I read the manuals, a couple of books (including, ironically as it turned out, Steve Bourne's), a bunch of various source code, and a lot of unix-wizards discussions. Chet -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet at case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/