Robert G. Brown
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:59:48 -0700
On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
By the time of SunOS 1.1, I believe there was Unipress emacs around, as you note. In any case, the Suns I used of that vintage had Emacs available. (I have a genuine Sun 1 sitting in my mom's garage still -- double digit serial number.)As I mentioned, Emacs was not included in the OS distribution from Sun. If the Sun systems you were working on had Emacs, someone went to the trouble of installing it from some other source.
This mirrors my own experience, except that I took over managing our Unix network from a REAL Unix Old Hand, who was running it on a PDP (20?) for several years in the department before I started doing unix (and sysadmin) in 1986/1987. We had jove in part because we WERE on uucp, and actually were on the early internet with our own IP numbers and domain in the 128.x.x.x block (the first one heavily populated in .edu) over a 56K leased line by what maybe 1983 or 1984? Cyrus had the PDP nicely outfitted with the earliest sources -- the PDP ran homebuilt BSD IIRC, and "came" with various build your own packages that were being passed around on the early internet even back then via FTP as well as uucp. I think jove was just smaller and tighter than emacs (which was already suffering from bloat, and back then megabytes WERE extremely dear, both on disk and in "core". Which was still core, in many cases...;-). By 88 or 89 I was the department's more or less full time part time unix sysadmin (as well as teaching physics, doing research, coding). I had a sun 386i originally (department server a 4/110 that we upgraded to a 4/310 before it finally went away), and got the very first sparcstation 1 in the department if not the school (followed in due time with a 2) a few years later. By maybe 1988 I was already in the habit of going in and rebuilding the sources in /usr/local (NFS mounted) per architecture, per new machine, per hacks as we got e.g. SGIs (sysv-ish) and ran them with Suns (BSD-ish). At that point jove was WAY better than VI, as it is a coder's editor and rebuilding all that source was really a coding problem, but you absolutely had to use vi -- no "m" appended on a new, naked system as that was what you had. Adequate for editing /etc/passwd. Not so good for editing a few thousand lines of code, a couple of Makefiles, running Make from inside and flipping through errors. So I was "spoiled" by being on the internet from the beginning, basically. Not its beginning, but my own experience with Unix. And having an uberunix perfect master for a guru. So I took source access for granted; heck, we were just down the road from one of the first big source repos at UNC and I did work oat ORNL where another (netlib) resided. rgb
[2] We did at one point buy some licenses for Unipress Emacs (the commercialized version of Gosling Emacs), but only a few hardy souls ever forced themselves to make use of it.Where I was, the '20 heads kind of insisted on Emacsen. Unfortunately, gosmacs didn't have a real extension language, so Gnu Emacs (which arrived quite shortly) was considered a big plus...IIRC there were maybe three or four of our users who toughed it out with Unipress, in maybe the 1985-1986 timeframe. It wasn't until GNU Emacs became available to us that Emacs got any traction in my office. --Bob
-- Robert G. Brown Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443 Duke University Physics Dept, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb Book of Lilith Website: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Lilith/Lilith.php Lulu Bookstore: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=877977 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf