@screwlisp is having some site connectivity problems so asked me to remind everyone that we'll be on the anonradio forum at the top of the hour (a bit less than ten minutes hence) for those who like that kind of thing:
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@dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
In effect, a Q register, what passed for storage in TECO, was something you can name in one bite. So 1,2mA meaning call what's in A with args 1 and 2 was a high-level language function call with two arguments that fit into a single machine word. Even the PDP-10 pushj instruction, which was pretty sophisticated as a way of calling a function, couldn't pass arguments with that degree of compactness.
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
it's not so much the editor itself, which, from your description doesn't seem that much worse than, say, what you had to do in IBM XEDIT to get stuff done,
but the macro system, specifically, which as I understand it,(1) was an add-on, (2) would have needed utility commands that one didn't use in the normal course of editing (e.g., for rearranging arguments + building control constructs) and therefore were put on obscure characters, and *this* is where things went nuts…
I recall briefly viewing the TOPS-20 Emacs sources … *did* look like somebody had whacked a cable out in the hall (time to hit refresh-screen)
… granted, I may be misremembering; this *was* 40 years ago… -
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
it's not so much the editor itself, which, from your description doesn't seem that much worse than, say, what you had to do in IBM XEDIT to get stuff done,
but the macro system, specifically, which as I understand it,(1) was an add-on, (2) would have needed utility commands that one didn't use in the normal course of editing (e.g., for rearranging arguments + building control constructs) and therefore were put on obscure characters, and *this* is where things went nuts…
I recall briefly viewing the TOPS-20 Emacs sources … *did* look like somebody had whacked a cable out in the hall (time to hit refresh-screen)
… granted, I may be misremembering; this *was* 40 years ago…@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
I also recall '~' being an important character that showed up a lot in TECO for some reason,
and *normally* the only time you'd see sequences of ~'s in large numbers was when your modem was dying and your line was about to be dropped
and this may, at least partially, be where TECO's "line noise" reputation came from.
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@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
... and, crap, I messed up the threading (it seems 9 and 10 are siblings, so you'll miss 9 if you're reading from here. 9 is kind of the point. Go back to 8.)
(I hate this UI. If anybody's written an emacs fediverse-protocol thing for doing long threaded posts please point me to it, otherwise it looks like I'm going to have to write one ...)
𝜔/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
hmm... is there a way to do a reply that is *also* a quote-post? I should try this.
Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ (@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net)
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca To the point where, the following summer as an intern, I was needing to write a tree walk, and I wrote it in FORTRAN — because that's what was available at AT&T Basking Ridge (long story) — using fake recursion (local vars get dimensions as arrays, every call/return becomes a computed goto, you get the idea…) because I wanted to see if this *could* actually be done in FORTRAN, and it could, and it worked, and there was much rejoicing; I think my supervisor (who, to be fair, was not really a programmer) blue-screened on that one. And *then* I tried to explain it all to my dad... 8/11
Mastodon (mastodon.murkworks.net)
(𝜔+1)/11
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@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
hmm... is there a way to do a reply that is *also* a quote-post? I should try this.
Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ (@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net)
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca To the point where, the following summer as an intern, I was needing to write a tree walk, and I wrote it in FORTRAN — because that's what was available at AT&T Basking Ridge (long story) — using fake recursion (local vars get dimensions as arrays, every call/return becomes a computed goto, you get the idea…) because I wanted to see if this *could* actually be done in FORTRAN, and it could, and it worked, and there was much rejoicing; I think my supervisor (who, to be fair, was not really a programmer) blue-screened on that one. And *then* I tried to explain it all to my dad... 8/11
Mastodon (mastodon.murkworks.net)
(𝜔+1)/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
(I'm guessing a mastodon UI that actually respects the use of surreal numbers to number multipost components and rearranges threads accordingly will be implemented approximately never.
… though I suppose it could turn out to be one of the more creative ways to get kicked off of the Fediverse … )
(𝜔/2)/11
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@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
I also recall '~' being an important character that showed up a lot in TECO for some reason,
and *normally* the only time you'd see sequences of ~'s in large numbers was when your modem was dying and your line was about to be dropped
and this may, at least partially, be where TECO's "line noise" reputation came from.
@wrog @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Funny, I couldn't recall "~" being important at all so had to go check. See https://codeberg.org/PDP-10/its/src/branch/master/doc/_teco_/tecord.1132 and while I do see a few uses of it, they seem very minor.
I read this into an Emacs editor buffer and did "M-x occur" looking for [~] and got these, all of which seem highly obscure. I think it is probably because in the early days there may have been a desire not to have case matter, so the upper and lower case versions of these special characters (see line 2672 below) may have once been equivalent or might have some reason to want to reserve space to be equivalent in some cases. Remember that, for example, on a VT52, he CTRL key did not add a control bit but masked out all the bits beyond the 5th, so that CTRL+@ and CTRL+Space were the same (null) character, for example. And sometimes tools masked out the 7th bit in order to uppercase something, which means that certain characters like these might have in some cases gotten blurred.
10 matches for "[~]" in buffer: tecord.1132
1270: use a F~ to compare the error message string against a
2017: case special character" (one of "`{|}~<rubout>").
2235: the expected ones, with F~.
2370: kept in increasing order, as F~ would say, or FO's binary
2672: also ("@[\]^_" = "`{|}~<rubout>").
4192:F~ compares strings, ignoring case difference. It is just
4446: this option include F^A, F^E, F=, FQ, F~, G and M.
4942: string storage space, but begins with a "~" (ASCII 176)
4977: character should be the rubout beginning a string or the "~"
4980: "~" or rubout, then it is not a pointer - just a plain number.If I recall correctly, this also meant in some tools it was possible if you were using a control-prefix con CTRL-^ to have CTRL-^ CTRL-@ be different than CTRL-^ @ because one of them might set the control bit on @ and the other on null, so there was a lot of ailasing. It even happened for regular characters that CTRL-^ CTRL-A would get you a control bit set on #o1 while CTRL+^ A would get you the control bit set on 65. Some of these worked very differently on the Knight TV, which used SAIL characters, I think, and which thought a code like 1 was an uparrow, not a control-A. There were a lot of blurry areas, and it was hell on people who wanted to make a Dvorak mode because it was the VT52 (and probably VT100 and AAA) hardware that was doing this translation, so there was no place to software intercept all this and make it different, so that's probably why something as important as Teco treaded lightly on making some case distinctions.
But if someone remembers, better, please let me know. It's been 4+ decades since I used this stuff a lot and details slip away. It's just that these things linger, I think, because they were so important to realize were live rails not to tread upon. And because I did, for a while, live and breathe this stuff, since I wrote a few TECO libraries (like ZBABYL and the original TeX mode), so I guess practice drills it in, too.
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@dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
In effect, a Q register, what passed for storage in TECO, was something you can name in one bite. So 1,2mA meaning call what's in A with args 1 and 2 was a high-level language function call with two arguments that fit into a single machine word. Even the PDP-10 pushj instruction, which was pretty sophisticated as a way of calling a function, couldn't pass arguments with that degree of compactness.
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yes, right. To all that. One minor point is that the PDP-6/10 had a byte-addressing instruction that was pretty weird (overkill in flexibility, like every PDP-6/10 instruction). So that data packing wasn't all that unreasonable.
I showed up to the TECO world in Jan. 1973 with a gofer programming gig in the Macsyma group. The Datapoint terminals were already there, so I missed the pre-(almost)WYSIWYG days.
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@wrog @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Funny, I couldn't recall "~" being important at all so had to go check. See https://codeberg.org/PDP-10/its/src/branch/master/doc/_teco_/tecord.1132 and while I do see a few uses of it, they seem very minor.
I read this into an Emacs editor buffer and did "M-x occur" looking for [~] and got these, all of which seem highly obscure. I think it is probably because in the early days there may have been a desire not to have case matter, so the upper and lower case versions of these special characters (see line 2672 below) may have once been equivalent or might have some reason to want to reserve space to be equivalent in some cases. Remember that, for example, on a VT52, he CTRL key did not add a control bit but masked out all the bits beyond the 5th, so that CTRL+@ and CTRL+Space were the same (null) character, for example. And sometimes tools masked out the 7th bit in order to uppercase something, which means that certain characters like these might have in some cases gotten blurred.
10 matches for "[~]" in buffer: tecord.1132
1270: use a F~ to compare the error message string against a
2017: case special character" (one of "`{|}~<rubout>").
2235: the expected ones, with F~.
2370: kept in increasing order, as F~ would say, or FO's binary
2672: also ("@[\]^_" = "`{|}~<rubout>").
4192:F~ compares strings, ignoring case difference. It is just
4446: this option include F^A, F^E, F=, FQ, F~, G and M.
4942: string storage space, but begins with a "~" (ASCII 176)
4977: character should be the rubout beginning a string or the "~"
4980: "~" or rubout, then it is not a pointer - just a plain number.If I recall correctly, this also meant in some tools it was possible if you were using a control-prefix con CTRL-^ to have CTRL-^ CTRL-@ be different than CTRL-^ @ because one of them might set the control bit on @ and the other on null, so there was a lot of ailasing. It even happened for regular characters that CTRL-^ CTRL-A would get you a control bit set on #o1 while CTRL+^ A would get you the control bit set on 65. Some of these worked very differently on the Knight TV, which used SAIL characters, I think, and which thought a code like 1 was an uparrow, not a control-A. There were a lot of blurry areas, and it was hell on people who wanted to make a Dvorak mode because it was the VT52 (and probably VT100 and AAA) hardware that was doing this translation, so there was no place to software intercept all this and make it different, so that's probably why something as important as Teco treaded lightly on making some case distinctions.
But if someone remembers, better, please let me know. It's been 4+ decades since I used this stuff a lot and details slip away. It's just that these things linger, I think, because they were so important to realize were live rails not to tread upon. And because I did, for a while, live and breathe this stuff, since I wrote a few TECO libraries (like ZBABYL and the original TeX mode), so I guess practice drills it in, too.
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe '~' was prevalant in Emacs source, or I'm conflating TECO with Something Else.
By my era VT-52s were gone, you'd occasionally see a VT100 in a server room for not wanting to waste $$ there, the terminal of choice at Stanford CS was the Heathkit-19 + if you were in one of the well-financed research groups, you got a Sun-1 or a Sun-2. At DEC(WSL) where I interned, it was all personal VAXstations.
I do recall Emacs ^S and ^Q being problematic due to terminal mode occasionally getting set badly (and then the underlying hardware would wake up, "Oh, flow control! I know how to do that!", ^S would freeze everything and you had to Just Know to do ^Q...)
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@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe '~' was prevalant in Emacs source, or I'm conflating TECO with Something Else.
By my era VT-52s were gone, you'd occasionally see a VT100 in a server room for not wanting to waste $$ there, the terminal of choice at Stanford CS was the Heathkit-19 + if you were in one of the well-financed research groups, you got a Sun-1 or a Sun-2. At DEC(WSL) where I interned, it was all personal VAXstations.
I do recall Emacs ^S and ^Q being problematic due to terminal mode occasionally getting set badly (and then the underlying hardware would wake up, "Oh, flow control! I know how to do that!", ^S would freeze everything and you had to Just Know to do ^Q...)
@wrog
This seems familiar, but I'm not wholly sure why.It is binary 01111110 and as such really did show up in some line noise contexts that favored such a thing (it's similar to 11111111).
It's also used by vi to mark nonexistent lines at the end of the file; Bill wanted it to be something other than just nothing on that screen line, for specificity of feedback to the user.
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@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe '~' was prevalant in Emacs source, or I'm conflating TECO with Something Else.
By my era VT-52s were gone, you'd occasionally see a VT100 in a server room for not wanting to waste $$ there, the terminal of choice at Stanford CS was the Heathkit-19 + if you were in one of the well-financed research groups, you got a Sun-1 or a Sun-2. At DEC(WSL) where I interned, it was all personal VAXstations.
I do recall Emacs ^S and ^Q being problematic due to terminal mode occasionally getting set badly (and then the underlying hardware would wake up, "Oh, flow control! I know how to do that!", ^S would freeze everything and you had to Just Know to do ^Q...)
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
> I also recall '~' being an important character
ok, I seem to be out-to-lunch on this
(or at least, remembering Something Else; but I can't imagine what...):https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/teco/emacs11/emacs11.tec
(admittedly, this is VAX/PDP-11 TECO source for Emacs and maybe Fred had to do a complete rewrite of some sort and the actual TOPS20/PDP-10 source is completely different -- given that there *is* significant dependence on wordsize and other architectural issues, it would have to be *somewhat* different -- but I'd still expect a lot of common code [unless there were copyright issues]).
It *does* definitely look like line noise, though.
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@screwlisp
Well there you go. So wrog just needs to find a list of such clients to choose the most suitable one -- if any.@dougmerritt @screwlisp @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot
what I *currently* do is compose inside Emacs (the *only* non-painful alternative for long posts),
then manually decide how I'm going to break it up -- which actually has some literary content to it, because in some cases, you *do* want to arrange the breaks for maximal dramatic effect
(generalized How to Use Paragraphs)Problem 1 being that emacs doesn't count characters the same way as mastodon does, and I don't find out until I've cut&pasted part n, which doesn't happen until I've already posted parts 1..n−1
Problem 2 being having to cut&paste in the first place when I should just be able to hit SEND (which then has to be from within emacs).
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@dougmerritt @screwlisp @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot
what I *currently* do is compose inside Emacs (the *only* non-painful alternative for long posts),
then manually decide how I'm going to break it up -- which actually has some literary content to it, because in some cases, you *do* want to arrange the breaks for maximal dramatic effect
(generalized How to Use Paragraphs)Problem 1 being that emacs doesn't count characters the same way as mastodon does, and I don't find out until I've cut&pasted part n, which doesn't happen until I've already posted parts 1..n−1
Problem 2 being having to cut&paste in the first place when I should just be able to hit SEND (which then has to be from within emacs).
@dougmerritt @screwlisp @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot
given that I once-upon-a-time wrote a MAPI client for the sake of being able to post to Microsoft Exchange forums in rich text using courier font, in theory, I should be able to do this.
... but that would mean I'd have to Learn Fediverse. crap.
hmm. Anyone have experience with
mastodon.el
mastodon.el - Emacs client for fediverse servers that implement the Mastodon API.
Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)
i.e., is the best one or if this just Guy Who Grabbed the Name first and did the best SEO twigging? (I hate that google search has gotten so enshittified)
(also, thanks, LazyWeb!)
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@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
(I'm guessing a mastodon UI that actually respects the use of surreal numbers to number multipost components and rearranges threads accordingly will be implemented approximately never.
… though I suppose it could turn out to be one of the more creative ways to get kicked off of the Fediverse … )
(𝜔/2)/11
@wrog
I support your right to free expression.
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@kentpitman @dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yes, right. To all that. One minor point is that the PDP-6/10 had a byte-addressing instruction that was pretty weird (overkill in flexibility, like every PDP-6/10 instruction). So that data packing wasn't all that unreasonable.
I showed up to the TECO world in Jan. 1973 with a gofer programming gig in the Macsyma group. The Datapoint terminals were already there, so I missed the pre-(almost)WYSIWYG days.
@djl
Lucky you; I went through teletypes, and then glass terminals lacking cursor control, before finally being in an environment with cursor control terminals capable of WYSIWYG -- and at that, it was pretty random back then who had heard the pro-WYSIWYG arguments and who had not, so... -
@djl
Lucky you; I went through teletypes, and then glass terminals lacking cursor control, before finally being in an environment with cursor control terminals capable of WYSIWYG -- and at that, it was pretty random back then who had heard the pro-WYSIWYG arguments and who had not, so...@dougmerritt @djl @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
For those looking on who might not know these terms, teletypes had paper feeding through and mostly did only output that was left-to-right and then fed that line and then did not back up ever to a previous line. They were also loud and clunky, mostly, and had keyboards that had keys you had to press way down in order to get them to take.
Glass terminals were displays that could only do output to the bottom line of the screen, kind of like a paper terminal but without the paper. Once it scrolled up, you couldn't generally scroll back down. But that's why it might sound like it would have cursor control but did not yet.
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@djl
Lucky you; I went through teletypes, and then glass terminals lacking cursor control, before finally being in an environment with cursor control terminals capable of WYSIWYG -- and at that, it was pretty random back then who had heard the pro-WYSIWYG arguments and who had not, so...@dougmerritt @kentpitman @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yes. I missed the teletype round. Sort of. Father was site engineer for one of the early LINC 8 installations, and later a PDP-7 installation, and they had teletypes. They.Were.Horrid.
Peter Belmont (later Ada developer) tried to persuade me to do programming, but I was busy doing other things. The IBM card puches had really sweet keyboards, though.
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@dougmerritt @djl @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
For those looking on who might not know these terms, teletypes had paper feeding through and mostly did only output that was left-to-right and then fed that line and then did not back up ever to a previous line. They were also loud and clunky, mostly, and had keyboards that had keys you had to press way down in order to get them to take.
Glass terminals were displays that could only do output to the bottom line of the screen, kind of like a paper terminal but without the paper. Once it scrolled up, you couldn't generally scroll back down. But that's why it might sound like it would have cursor control but did not yet.
@kentpitman
Yes, and to clarify your final two sentences, the *display* scrolled up with each additional line emitted -- the *cursor* could never scroll up.In my environment at Berkeley, these were Lear Siegler ADM 3 terminals. The slightly later ADM 3a terminals finally allowed the cursor to be moved around at will (although they didn't have any fancier abilities, unlike still later devices).
Thanks for thinking to explain what I did not.
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@dougmerritt @djl @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
For those looking on who might not know these terms, teletypes had paper feeding through and mostly did only output that was left-to-right and then fed that line and then did not back up ever to a previous line. They were also loud and clunky, mostly, and had keyboards that had keys you had to press way down in order to get them to take.
Glass terminals were displays that could only do output to the bottom line of the screen, kind of like a paper terminal but without the paper. Once it scrolled up, you couldn't generally scroll back down. But that's why it might sound like it would have cursor control but did not yet.
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
The datapoint terminals were _almost_ wysiwyg: they didn't have a cursor, so the TECO of the time inserted "/\" in the text displayed, and you could insert text there, delete the next character and the like.
But TECO allowed you to change the "/\" to whatever you liked, so if you left your terminal, someone would change that to "/\Foo is loser" and Foo wouldn't be able to delete that text from Foo's file...
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@djl
Lucky you; I went through teletypes, and then glass terminals lacking cursor control, before finally being in an environment with cursor control terminals capable of WYSIWYG -- and at that, it was pretty random back then who had heard the pro-WYSIWYG arguments and who had not, so...@dougmerritt @kentpitman @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
I've been through 17 or so environments, and I was always able to find an editor that could be persuaded to act the way I wanted: CCA, NEC, AT&T and even Word for MS-DOS.
Hilariously, Word for Windows defeated me. There was no way to persuade it to act as a civilized text editor, so I acquired the source code to WordPad and implemented my usual TECO macros in C++, and used that for 20 years or so.
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@dougmerritt @kentpitman @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
I've been through 17 or so environments, and I was always able to find an editor that could be persuaded to act the way I wanted: CCA, NEC, AT&T and even Word for MS-DOS.
Hilariously, Word for Windows defeated me. There was no way to persuade it to act as a civilized text editor, so I acquired the source code to WordPad and implemented my usual TECO macros in C++, and used that for 20 years or so.
@djl
Hey, you want what you want.Also: spoken like a true hacker. "I will bend the universe (of computing) to my will!"
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@dougmerritt @screwlisp @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot
given that I once-upon-a-time wrote a MAPI client for the sake of being able to post to Microsoft Exchange forums in rich text using courier font, in theory, I should be able to do this.
... but that would mean I'd have to Learn Fediverse. crap.
hmm. Anyone have experience with
mastodon.el
mastodon.el - Emacs client for fediverse servers that implement the Mastodon API.
Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)
i.e., is the best one or if this just Guy Who Grabbed the Name first and did the best SEO twigging? (I hate that google search has gotten so enshittified)
(also, thanks, LazyWeb!)
