On Sun, Mar 10, 2019, 8:10 AM James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

On 03/09/2019 05:18 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

...

Surely next will be MS Office!

I'm still waiting on EDLIN. ;-)

Oh indeed!!! It would be interesting to compare code and functionality to ed... Has anyone else noticed that there is now a book on mastering ed, by Michael Lucas? I sorta want a copy of that ;-)

On 03/10/2019 12:11 PM, James Knott wrote:

I've only come across one editor that was worse than EDLIN.  It was the line editor on Pr1me computers.  We had a few of those systems at work.  As I recall, you could only jump to the top or bottom of the file or use relative jumps.  You couldn't jump directly to a specific line. =-O

Forgot to mention, the first editor I used was SCELBI's "ED", a simple line editor, which was better than that Pr1me editor.  I used ED on my IMSAI 8080. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCELBI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080

On 03/11/2019 11:59 AM, Kevin Cozens via talk wrote:

On 2019-03-10 12:19 p.m., James Knott via talk wrote:

...

Forgot to mention, the first editor I used was SCELBI's "ED", a simple line editor, which was better than that Pr1me editor.  I used ED on my IMSAI 8080.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCELBI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080

Very nice. Do you still have the IMSAI? I didn't know that SCELBI was a computer. I just know, and have, some of their books from back in the day.

No, unfortunately, I gave it away, after I bought my XT clone.  For some reason, my wife seemed to think I had to much stuff!  ;) The first personal computer I saw was a Scelbi H a friend had. In addition to a couple of books, I bought the Scelbi editor, assembler and monitor, along with SCELBAL Basic.  They came with paper tape, but I had no way to read the tapes, so I hand entered the octal code and saved to cassette.  Later on, I bought a used M35 ASR teletype from work and was then able to read and punch paper tape.

On 03/17/2019 12:32 PM, Anthony de Boer via talk wrote:

We also had some Decwriter IVs way back then, and a genuine ASR33 with the ^G bell being an actual bell with an electromagnetic hammer, and some early glass TTYs at least one of which dated back to before the ASCII standard was finalized, so it had a left-arrow character in place of the underscore.

We also had several DEC terminals, both "glass TTY" and mechanical.  I started my career overhauling Teletypes, so I can say with certainty that the bell on the M33 was entirely mechanical.  There was a pawl that was triggered, when the appropriate code appeared on the code bars.  Of course, the code bar that tripped the pawl could be configured for the appropriate character as used for the bell.  On the similar 5 bit "Baudot" M32, the bell could be either Figs-J or Figs-F  It's been *MANY* years since I've given much thought to the mechanical operation of Teletype machines.  ;) Figs = Figures Shift, a function necessary with the 5 bit code to handle both alphabet and numbers/punctuation.

On 03/17/2019 04:46 PM, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:

I can confirm that Baudot is alive and (maybe not quite) well in RTTY for amateur radio. It's one of the few digital radio modes that's amenable to massive amplification, so 2 kW+ QRO RTTY rigs are not uncommon. Listen in around 14.1 MHz and you'll hear RTTY contests bleating away every weekend. Still around 45 baud, too. Fldigi on Linux can encode and decode it. 

Actually, 45.4 baud.  I used to run RTTY, with both Baudot and ASCII.  I wrote the terminal software for my IMSAI 8080 and designed & built the serial port board for it.  I designed and wired it for 8 ports, but only had 3 installed.  I also built my demodulator, based on a couple of magazine articles, but my Kenwood TS-820s had a built in FSK keyer, so I didn't have to build that half of the system. My serial board used the same 8250 UART as the IBM PC, but in a much more intelligent manner.  Instead of each UART having it's own IRQ line, my board shared one among all ports, in the same manner as used on mini-computers, where 8 or 16 port boards were commonly used.  When one UART generated an IRQ, my software would read a port to determine which one needed service and write the same value back, to select the appropriate UART.  In the process of testing that board, I discovered a bug in the UART, that Western Digital didn't know about.  However, there was an easy work around. The software I wrote could convert between Baudot and ASCII, so that I could copy the incoming traffic on my M35 Teletype.  It also had a few canned messages and RY or U* generator, to create a continuous reversing bit pattern, to help the other end tune in  the signal.  I also had unshift on space and several other useful features in that software, such as starting up the tape reader, on the M35, to send tapes, with conversion to Baudot when needed.  Back in those days, you knew your computer inside and out, because you did everything from scratch or a kit.