[sf-lug] at(1)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> And it's not a (then) mighty VAX, but a pdp11 ... emulation - takes much
> less basement space that way (also freely available - but as in beer,
> not freedom ... at least last I checked ... at least for those old UNIX
> bits.  The emulator I believe is DFSG free.)

I'm glad it's not a _physical_ PDP11, both for the sake of your
electrical bills and out of relief at the flashbacks to summer sessions
in Evans Hall that I'll avoid.  ;->

Hey, I'll bet the emulator could even run 2BSD, oooh!  Of course, you
might have to crank its total VM RAM up to the full _4MB_ physical
expansion memory[1] capacity of a PDP11/70, to pull that off.

TECO[2] on RSTS/E, anyone?  ;->  It's the text editor that makes vi look
user-friendly, by comparison.  And it supported a built-in program
interpreter whose command syntax was, shall we say, not the very model
of clarity:

Ready

run TECO
*GZ0J\UNQN"E 20UN '
BUH BUV HK
QN< J BUQ QN*10/3UI
QI< \ +2*10+(QQ*QI)UA
B L K QI*2-1UJ QA/QJUQ
QA-(QQ*QJ)-2\ 10 at I// -1%I >
QQ/10UT QH+QT+48UW QW-58"E 48UW %V ' QV"N QV^T '
QWUV QQ-(QT*10)UH >
QV^T @^A/
/HKEX$$
31415926535897932384

Ready

[1] Semiconductor memory, at that.  Most earlier models, pre-PDP11/45,
supported only core memory.  600 ns access times.  {shudder}

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Editor_and_Corrector
"It's alive!  It's alive!  Ayeeee!"   http://almy.us/teco.html