piner@pur-phy (Richard Piner) (10/28/89)
I have comments and questions about the TOPS software. I ordered a copy from Microware, and it got here is less than a week. (cost 100 bucks for 8 floppies of stuff) After looking through it, I decided the first three disk contained things that I wanted. The rest was uucp, "notes", mail, and games. It has a replacement for the tsmon/login pair. The replacement knows how to answer the phone and other neat things. The login software uses encrypted passwords. This makes converting tricky. The old password file won't work. You have to edit the password file and change all the passwords to null (ie. ,,). Be sure to do that first. Then after the software has been installed, you can use the new passwd command to reset the password for each user. But I digress. The software does have csh, vi, umacs3.9, zmodem, ls, find, who, and other goodies. I've found no bugs so far. That's the good news. Now the bad news. There is a man program and docs for some of the software, but not all. Plus, there is almost no information on installing the software and making it all work together. If you don't know both OS9 and UNIX, don't try to do it without the help of an expert. Don't copy everything over to the hard disk without checking for name conflicts first. TOPS software does replace a few OS9 files such as password. csh is not complete. It has history and alias. However is lacks most variables used in shell scripts. It knows about $1, $2, etc, but does not know about $*. It works, and it is better than "shell", but don't expect too much. Vi is very limited. It knows about "r" but not "R", for example. It can't do a global search/replace. "p" is really slow. The yank buffer is fixed at 2K. But, at least it does not crash. vi is a hacked version of SteVie. Now comes the question. It seems that vi has a very dumb visual driver. It requires that the line length be set to 1 less than the real number of lines on the screen. Also, it insist that "al" and "dl" exist in the termcap entry. These are the add line and delete line functions. Any terminal without these functions (such as a vt100) will not work with vi. We have a PC in the lab with PCPLOT as the terminal emulator. PCPLOT's vt100 emulation does not have add line/delete line functions. But, the boss is a vi fan. So, does anyone know of a better terminal emulation program for the PC that will work with vi? The PC isn't much good for anything but terminal emulation. I'll post a list of the TOPS software later. R. Piner