Fwd: is there any word processing software for the pdp11?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2014-12-01 15:44, Ian S. King wrote:
> I didn't know there was an Emacs for PDP-11, and I've looked.  Good news!
> And running on v6?  Even better.  Yet another reason for me to fix that
> RK05 on my 11/34 and get it running again.

Depends on your definition of Emacs...

You definitely have JOVE, which is pretty decent. And MicroEMACS. And 
there was/is AMIS for RSTS/E. And I'm sure a few others...

I know I've written a kind of Emacs for TECO on a PDP-8. That should 
work on a PDP-11 as well...

	Johnny

> On Dec 1, 2014 4:53 AM, "Noel Chiappa" <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>>      >> Jacob Ritorto wrote:
>>
>>      >> Yeah, but troff is too hard.
>>
>> I'm going to pass over the obvious question ('why would anybody be doing
>> word
>> processing on a PDP-11 in this day and age' :-), and ask if nroff is also
>> too
>> hard? Since it's only intended for character devices (line printers, etc)
>> it's not quite as complex as troff.a
>>
>> I'm not sure if Bell had anything simpler; I'll have to look at my V6 Unix
>> manual set.
>>
>>      > From: Ian S. King
>>
>>      > But ... Emacs (originally EMACS, "eight megabytes and continuously
>>      > swapping") .. is ever going to run on a PDP-11.
>>
>> If you restrict yourself to GNU Emacs, yes. But there are more
>> implementations
>> of EMACS in the world than that bloated monstrosity!
>>
>> We ran an EMACS on V6 Unix at MIT, I forget who wrote it, I think it was
>> someone at BBN; it was quite a nice one. It was quite customizable (but
>> that
>> have only been key bindings and settings, not sure if it included code),
>> and
>> it had all the usual features: multiple buffers and windows, etc. (In fact,
>> it was so painful to use on a VT52, with its small screen, that I migrated
>> to
>> a Ann Arbor Ambassador terminal, with its much large screen, as soon as it
>> became available.)
>>
>>
>> I have several sets of backup tapes from one of the V6 machines at MIT; I
>> sent one off to Chuck Guzis, and he's gotten almost all the bits off of it
>> (a
>> few records had unrecoverable read errors, but the vast majority were OK -
>> like roughly 15 read errors in around 1500 records).
>>
>> I hope to annouce a vast trove of stuff soon from my tapes (once I figure
>> out
>> how to interpret the bits - they are written by a sui generis application
>> called 'saveRVD', and the _only_ documentation of how it did it is... on
>> that
>> tape! :-) That includes a lot of code written at MIT, as well as stuff from
>> elsewhere.
>>
>> Coming soon, in addition to that EMACS, should be BCPL, Algol, LISP and
>> some
>> other languages; MACRO-11 and the DEC linker (which I guess are also
>> available from UNSW tapes), but _also_ programs to convert back and forth
>> from .REL to a.out format, and to .LDA format; and a whole ton of other
>> applications (I have no idea what all is there - if anyone is interested, I
>> can make a pass through my manuals and try and make a list).
>>
>>          Noel
>>