On Wed, 3 Jul 2019, John Gardner wrote:
There were 24 lines per page unless over-ridden on the command
line.
The tool was real unix tool, lean and mean with only a few
arguments.
It was far less functional than either 'more' or 'less' but it
did
let you page through a file or STDIN nicely
Yep, that's the sort of pager I imagined would have been present on all
terminals. I can't imagine how people coped with using `ls -l` in
directories with more files than their screen had lines (unless one was
fastidious with their use of grep(1)?) It just feels unrealistic for a
terminal not to have a pager. Then again, our TTYs these days have
full-screen editing, 24-bit colour codes, Fraktur lettering, and God knows
what else I'm forgetting...
Back in those days, terminals ran at 30-240 characters per second. Not all
that fast. Actually 300 characters per second, i.e. 300 baud, was slowww!
I remember being blown away by 9600 baud terminals.
The 'coping mechanism' was that one pretty quickly became adept at using
CTRL-S/CTRL-Q to stop/start the screen display.
Regards - Damian
Pacific Engineering Systems International, 277-279 Broadway, Glebe NSW 2037
Ph:+61-2-8571-0847 .. Fx:+61-2-9692-9623 | unsolicited email not wanted here
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