On Thu, Jul 23, 2020, at 6:50 PM, Skip Tavakkolian wrote:
> Going by memory, assuming aux/vga ran, you should be able to type 8-Alt-1-2 
> to type 8½
> You should also be able to start acme or sam instead of 8½.

These will probably work, except acme hadn't been invented yet and sam may or 
may not give an error the first time. (Checked with another demo disk.) You 
probably do want to start the window system, there is no way to kill the 
foreground process without it.

I could email a slightly newer demo disk which prompts, "Start the window 
system? (y/n)". Note that it has more annoyances than 4th edition. For 
instance, while the down arrow key behaves appropriately, the up arrow key 
inserts Î. Home inserts Í, End inserts CR. Double-click doesn't select anything 
in 8½, which is a nuisance when you habitually use send. The grep command does 
not exist! It does, however, have ftpfs. Useful demo, not useful tool.

I could email a 2nd edition CD-ROM too. It has grep and the source to 
everything, but it's not a bootable disk. I don't think the demo floppy's 
kernel has appropriate drivers. (It certainly lacks 9660srv.) The contents of 
#S are unfamiliar too. The demo floppy lacks a lot of things, such as 
/dev/drivers and even ns, which hinders exploration. I extracted a bunch of 
kernels from the CD-ROM in the past, but I couldn't be bothered to figure out 
how to boot them, much less find which one(s) will mount root from a CD-ROM. I 
wonder if they'll boot if I tell qemu they're floppy disk images... (tired now)

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