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

[Damian McGuckin]

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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