Open larsbrinkhoff opened 7 years ago
Are there any more recent releases than the tape image? From alt.sys.pdp10 in October 2011:
OK, putting on my hat as the official maintainer of MIT TECO and EMACS (for TOPS-20 and ITS). [...] (FWIW, I happen to have a GNU Emacs running on the museum's Toad-1 right now,
alongside an EMACS.)
I have asked, and no, there aren't.
Do we have the tape of the sources for TECO/EMACS for Emacs 170?
Yes, here: https://github.com/PDP-10/emacs
It's a TOPS-20 tape, but individual files are available on a branch.
Anything there that we don't have or should merge into the ITS version?
I haven't checked yet. I'm quite happy with EMACS 162, so I haven't felt an urgent need to upgrade.
EMACS 170 (and TECO 1220) were TOPS-20 only updates based on the Stanford TOPS-20 version of TECO and EMACS 16507 (a couple of edits later than 165). I did this in order to create the best version of EMACS for XKL's expected customer customer base, with enhancements from SimTel20 and MIT.[1]
Here's the edit history from the top of TECO.MID.1220:[2]
; --MIDAS--
;[TOED.XKL.COM]DXX:
;;;The following comment, inserted in historical order, was the content of the ;;;file TECO.CHANGES:
;[WASHINGTON]PS:
;[WASHINGTON]PS:
[1] In early 1996, there really was no expectation that ITS would ever resurface. [2] As it happens, the work was completed two months before Richard Troiano and I did the customer survey which showed that 60 TOPS-20 systems had been retired in the previous 12 months, killing the Toad-1's chances in the marketplace, and leading to XKL's decision to return to the networking arena.
There's a Y2K fix for the TIME library for TOPS-20 on the tape (also see news:mddhaviz88u.fsf-@panix5.panix.com). Bug #829 suggests FSDATE is now returning year - 1900, so I guess we'd need to do a similar fix for ITS (or make FSDATE return year % 100).
Most of the time, I have preferred to make changes to use four-digit years.
That sounds sensible. Looking at the TECO code, FSDATE (FS DATE) just returns the raw result of RQDATE, so it's actually FSDCNV (FS FDCONVERT) and SYMDAT (EG) that need modifying to format and parse (!) four-digit years on ITS. Then, with a bit of luck, Rich's Y2K-fixed code should work without the ITS/TOPS-20 conditionals.
(If grepping for the above, bear in mind they show up with and without spaces and truncation, e.g. FSFDCONVERT, FS FD CONV...)
There are definitely some changes that will NOT work on ITS. For example, in CCL, the :EJ references were changed to ELIB -- in the code. And the code is not conditionalized for TOPS-20. It would, of course, be trivial to conditionalize it -- there is plenty of conditionalized code based on "osteco", but there is at least one case where TOPS-20 changes were made that are not conditionalized and are breaking (for ITS).
As noted, when I made the TECO 1220/EMACS 170 changes in 1996, there was no expectation of ITS ever coming back. Because of TOPS-20 naming conventions, :EJ files required a ^V before the colon, making them difficult to manipulate. I had experimented a decade before with renaming them to ELIB in a private version of EMACS which dropped ITS-only commands, and included the TOPS-20 library's commands into the standard build; when I decided to update TECO with the changes from Palo Alto, White Sands, and Cambridge, I also decided to make life easier for future TOPS-20 based maintainers. I think it would be a simple matter to have modern ITS recognize both :EJ and ELIB as compiled TECO library files, and prefer the latter for future development.
I think this is a good recommendation. I find ^Q:EJ inconvenient to type too. ELIB is much friendlier. So I support the idea of making the ITS emacs support either :EJ or ELIB with :EJ treated as "legacy" and new libraries being generated as ELIBs. If/when we integrate the emacs 170 (twenex) code into the ITS code, we could do this.
Whoa, scary! But yes, it's good idea. Even DIRED won't handle :EJ file names correctly. E.g. it can't delete those files.
Fixed FS FDCONVERT$ in #829.
Rich Alderson's TOPS-20 EMACS 170 may have some nice updates.