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From: Sebastian <sebastian@here.com.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.misc,comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: Looking for historical source of the ex/vi editor
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2024 22:15:54 -0000 (UTC)
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In comp.unix.programmer Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.moc> wrote:
> Hello, all.
> 
> Have you an idea where one could find the sources of the
> various versions of the ex/vi editor, besides those archived
> at TUHS:
> 
>    1BSD/ex-1.1
>    2.11BSD/src/ucb/ex
>    2.9BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex/ex2
>    2.9BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex/ex3
>    2BSD/src/ex
>    3BSD/usr/src/cmd/ex
>    4.1cBSD/usr/src/ucb/ex
>    4.2BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex
>    4.3BSD-Reno/src/usr.bin/ex
>    4.3BSD-Tahoe/usr/src/ucb
>    4.3BSD-UWisc/src/ucb/ex
>    4.3BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex
>    4.4BSD/usr/src/usr.bin/ex
>    4BSD/usr/src/cmd/ex
>    SunOS-4.1.4/usr.bin/ex
>    OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/vi
> 
> These include vv. 1.1, 2.13, 3.2, 3.6, and many variants of
> 3.7.  Has anything else been preserved to your knowledge?

If you SSH to 3b2@sdf.org, you can find your way into an emulated
PDP-11 running System V. It has some version of vi installed,
with source code. It's possible to extract this code from the
system by first porting uuencode to it, and then porting a
version of tar that you can also run someplace else. The tar
that's installed on the system is not compatible with modern tars,
nor is it compatible with V7 tar.

GNU Screen has a command called "log" (default key binding:
C-a H) that dumps all terminal output to a file. This is
the best way I can think of to get output from uuencode down
to your local disk.

I found it easy to port the tar from V7 to this system, and I
was also able to port it to Linux.

I don't know what version of vi it is, but the following
appears at the end of the READ_ME, and might help identify
it:

>                                        5/07/82
>                                        HOCC UNIX Support
>                                        Jim Seagraves (houxi!beau)
>
>Afternote:
>                The 70 and vax code has been working for over a
>        week on th HOCC machines.  Let me know if any problems arise.
>        Also, please forward any new and wonderful termcap descriptions.

The man page says "UNIX 5.0" at the top and is dated 10/10/83. The
source tree looks different from the 2.11BSD version of vi. The
man page talks a lot about features that were removed from the editor
to get it to fit on a PDP-11.