Re: [Beowulf] Re: Religious wars

[Robert G. Brown]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:

Although it wasn't my first machine [1], I did work with an
admittedly-old-at-the-time PDP-8 for a while in the early
1980s. It was used to run a Perkin-Elmer microdensitometer
(think quarter-million-dollar film scanner).  IIRC it had
no non-volatile memory, and thus one needed to hand-load
the bootstrap program using the front panel switches [2].
With the one I worked on, there was a hand-written sequence
of octal codes taped up on the machine rack, and to fire
it up you would mount a certain 9-track tape in the drive,
toggle [3] the bootstrap code into memory using switches,
and start it to running. The toggled-in code would load
the rest of the OS from the tape drive. There was another
version that would load the OS from a paper tape reader
attached to the teletype, but no one ever bothered with it
because it was such a PITA to use. Once you got it going it
would read the data from the microdensitometer and write
it to another 9-track tape (same drive, you'd unload the
OS tape and mount the data tape). And once you had the
data tape, you'd take it over to a PDP-11 and process the
image using routines coded in Forth...

That's how I booted the PDP-1, almost exactly.  Good memory.  Except it
had the boot program on a paper loop that was permanently installed.
Toggle, fire, paper loop goes swoosh, tape drive lives, boot continues.

Anyway, this is a good example of the sort of expectation
management that many of us went through in those early
days. By comparison, even ed starts to look pretty darned
functional.

Did I ever mention the months of my life I lost to an
attempt to get TeX to (a) compile and run in TSO on OS/MVS,
and (b) get it to generate output for an IBM 3820
remote SNA-attached laser printer?

Sounds fascinating;-)

I suppose the bright side, we didn't have to trouble
ourselves with firewalls, encryption, virus scanners,
security patches, or in many cases even authentication
systems...

vi back then was little more than a shell on ed IIRC

It was (for nvi, is) the visual mode of ex, which is/was an extended
line editor in the lineage of ed, kind of an extended ed.

Correct. In ex you would enter the command "vi" at the
colon-prompt to enter visual mode. You should still be
able to do this on any system with vi installed -- give
it a try! :-) FWIW, the shell command "vi" simply fires
up ex in that mode to start with.

Fires or fired -- I have no idea what vim does now.  I'd have thought
that it long ago divorced itself from ed (or em, en, ... ex) at the
source level.  But I used that trick (hopping from ed/ex into and out of
vi) fewer times than I have fingers on one hand back in the day.  Why,
if one had fullscreen, would one ever use single line?  Unless, of
course, one was working on a genuine tty lineprinter, which I
exceedingly rarely had to do (gnashing teeth most of the time) because
the console had crashed somehow and yes, we had a teletype console to
log all the messages.

Just from working on PC's for five years before starting on Unix, I had
higher expectations than ed if there was anything BUT a teletype --
anything with an actual screen.  Ed reminded me of edlin, and edlin was
a pretty pitiful editor (probably derived in some way from ed, come to
think of it).  As in one could write a better editor for any PC in maybe
500 lines of basica, and a WAY better editor with any compiler (and
still have it fit on a floppy, or at most two).

sed, on the other hand, I still use quite regularly, and it is basically
an ed extension as well.  Being scriptable and grokking regex's makes
all the difference in the world, and if you have to change frog to toad
in an entire directory of files or manage any number of other clever
global changes, sed is hard to beat.  Again an arcane tool and not for
the timid (and more than a bit dangerous in terms of side effects:-) but
if you ask your average a Windows MCSE to go through a directory tree
and change all those frogs into toads (or perhaps princes:-) either
he'll still be working a week later with some of the frogs turned into
prinecs or pirnces or he'll have installed cygwin and done it using sed
in less than an hour INCLUDING the cygwin download and install.

   rgb

--Bob

[1] that was an IBM 1130 which bootsrapped off a single, 80-column
puchcard containing a small amount of object code.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Multiplex-80_after_30_years.jpg

[3] You would enter the address you wanted to start at in
octal (actually just binary grouped into three digits)
using the switches -- IIRC up for "1" and down for "0",
and then throw another switch that would load that number
into the address register. Then you'd reset the switches to
the pattern for the data you wanted there, and throw the
"deposit" switch. Again IIRC as long as you were loading
data into sequential addresses, it would auto-increment the
address register, so from then on you needed only to keep
entering each data value and pressing the deposit switch.

And as long as I'm blathering about toggling things in from
the front panel, I will go ahead and mention that I'm just
old enough to have once been invited over to the home of
one of my college professors to see this new Altair 8800
thing he was putting together...

--
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
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