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Re: [groff] 04/05: {g, n}roff.1.man: Give assistance to pager users.


From: Damian McGuckin
Subject: Re: [groff] 04/05: {g, n}roff.1.man: Give assistance to pager users.
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2019 10:25:23 +1000 (AEST)
User-agent: Alpine 2.02 (LRH 1266 2009-07-14)

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

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