RT-11 Paginated output to the terminal

[Pavel Tsybulin]

Hello grandparents who used RT-11.

Please tell me if there is a built-in RT-11 the ability to output text to the terminal page by page, i.e. 23 lines of text and a prompt "Press any key to continue", like it's done, for example, in the unix utility less?

I know about the ability to press ctrl-s ctrl-q, but at 115200 baud speed you need to be the fastest gun in the west, but I'm not.

Thanks,

  Pavel

[Johnny Billquist]

I'm not really an RT-11 user, but checking through manuals and so on, I
don't see any way of doing this in RT-11.

Johnny

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email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
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[Bert Driehuis]

This wasn't much of a problem in the days of the 110 bps Teletype 33.

I think in the days of RT11, a really fast terminal like the VT52 maxed out at 9600 bps. Most of our RSX-11 terminals ran at 1200 bps IIRC. You may want to just reduce the terminal speed to be period authentic.

Bert

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[Johnny Billquist]

I think the VT52 couldn't do more than 2400 bps. However, the VT52 had
paged output actually as a hardware feature of the terminal. You could
make it stop after a page full of output, and you had to hit a key to
get the next page.

However, times have moved on. RSX certainly can do paged output these
days. I *think* RSTS/E can as well. It's just RT-11 that don't.

Johnny

On 2025-11-02 16:09, Bert Driehuis wrote:
> This wasn't much of a problem in the days of the 110 bps Teletype 33.
>
> I think in the days of RT11, a really fast terminal like the VT52 maxed
> out at 9600 bps. Most of our RSX-11 terminals ran at 1200 bps IIRC. You
> may want to just reduce the terminal speed to be period authentic.
>
> Bert
>
> On Sun, 2 Nov 2025 at 09:41, Pavel Tsybulin <tsyb...@gmail.com
> <mailto:tsyb...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Hello grandparents who used RT-11.
> Please tell me if there is a built-in RT-11 the ability to output
> text to the terminal page by page, i.e. 23 lines of text and a
> prompt "Press any key to continue", like it's done, for example, in
> the unix utility less?
> I know about the ability to press ctrl-s ctrl-q, but at 115200 baud
> speed you need to be the fastest gun in the west, but I'm not.
>
> Thanks,
>   Pavel
>
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[Anton Lavrentiev]

> I think the VT52 couldn't do more than 2400 bps.

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[Johnny Billquist]

My bad. :-)
I might have been thinking of the VT05 then.

Johnny

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[Randy James]

The vt52 could do 9600 if the serial cards and cpus could drive it.

I had 4x vt52 in a Pdp-8/e running TSS-8 and could not drive vt52s at that speed - even though the interface dip switches permitted the 9600 setting.

But 4800 worked flawlessly even with many other peripherals.

Randy

> On Nov 2, 2025, at 9:46 AM, Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se> wrote:
>
> My bad. :-)

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[p q (p quinn)]

I'm sure it would be fairly easy to write a More equivalent, but I don't know of one. Back in the day, it was Cntl-Q, Cntrl-S, even with a 9600 baud terminal.

[Warner Losh]

I had a friend that hacked the rt11 tty driver to do more-like things. He wound up ditching it as too much of a hassle when always on...

Warner

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[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

You might be sufficiently happy with:

 

     sim> SET CONSOLE SPEED={300,1200,2400}

 

Output this slow will be responsive to ^S and ^Q

 

 

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[Johnny Billquist]

Well, you should keep terminal speed separate from the system being able
to keep the line busy all the time. :-)

But yeah, keeping multiple terminal lines fully busy on a PDP-8 might
stretch the thing a bit. But it also depends on what interface we're
talking about.

But nothing harmful comes out of the system not being able to keep the
line busy all the time. It just won't be getting about 1000 characters
per second, but something less. So the terminal is a bit more idle.

Johnny

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[Johnny Billquist]

Although if you're running at those speeds, you probably are not as
interested in getting something to pause after a page full, since you'll
be able to read it while it's coming.

The faster the speed, the more relevant/interesting it is to be able to
pause after a page...

Johnny

On 2025-11-02 22:38, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm wrote:
> You might be sufficiently happy with:
>
>      sim> SET CONSOLE SPEED={300,1200,2400}
>
> Output this slow will be responsive to ^S and ^Q
>

> *From:*pid...@googlegroups.com <pid...@googlegroups.com> *On Behalf Of
> *Warner Losh
> *Sent:* Sunday, November 2, 2025 11:30 AM
> *To:* p q (p quinn) <peterq...@gmail.com>
> *Cc:* [PiDP-11] <pid...@googlegroups.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [PiDP-11] RT-11 Paginated output to the terminal

>
> I had a friend that hacked the rt11 tty driver to do more-like things.
> He wound up ditching it as too much of a hassle when always on...
>
> Warner
>
> On Sun, Nov 2, 2025, 2:19 PM p q (p quinn) <peterq...@gmail.com
> <mailto:peterq...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I'm sure it would be fairly easy to write a More equivalent, but I
> don't know of one. Back in the day, it was Cntl-Q, Cntrl-S, even
> with a 9600 baud terminal.
>
> On Sunday, November 2, 2025 at 10:23:29 AM UTC-8

> randy.j...@gmail.com <mailto:randy.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The vt52 could do 9600 if the serial cards and cpus could driveit.
>
> I had 4x vt52 in a Pdp-8/e running TSS-8 and could not drive
> vt52s at that speed - even though the interface dip switches
> permitted the 9600 setting.
>
> But 4800 worked flawlessly even with many other peripherals.
>
> Randy
>
> > On Nov 2, 2025, at 9:46 AM, Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se

> <mailto:tsyb...@gmail.com%20%0b>>>>> <mailto:tsyb...@gmail.com

> <mailto:tsyb...@gmail.com>>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Hello grandparents who used RT-11.
> >>>> Please tell me if there is a built-in RT-11 the ability to
> output
> >>>> text to the terminal page by page, i.e. 23 lines of text
> and a
> >>>> prompt "Press any key to continue", like it's done, for
> example,in
> >>>> the unix utility less?
> >>>> I know about the ability to press ctrl-s ctrl-q, but at
> 115200 baud
> >>>> speed you need to be the fastest gun in the west, but I'm
> not.
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks,
> >>>> Pavel
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to
> the Google
> >>>> Groups "[PiDP-11]" group.
> >>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails
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> <mailto:pidp-11+u...@googlegroups.com>>.
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> >>> || on a psychedelic trip

> >>> email: b...@softjar.se <mailto:b...@softjar.se> || Reading

> murder books
> >>> pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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> > || on a psychedelic trip

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[Jerry Weiss]

If you are just looking for the RT-11 version of the *nix version of "more" check out DECUS 11s109

http://pdp-11.classiccmp.org/RT-11/freeware/sigtapes/11s109/mscutl/

   Jerry

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[Pavel Tsybulin]

Hi all.

Thank you so much to everyone who responded. it was very interesting and informative.

Unfortunately, there was no miracle and  there was no magic command like D 56=60565 that would make me happy :).

From all the answers it became clear that there are two options that are acceptable to me: 

1. A utility like more for page-by-page file output and

2. Changes in the terminal firmware to implement this viewing mode. (i'm using FPGA variants for both, pdp-11/70 and VT100 terminal)

The first option is easier to implement, although it is not universal for the entire system.  RT-11 doesn't have the concept of the pipes :(

The Fortran implementation seemed a bit cumbersome to me, so I wrote my own in macro11. (source attached)

Thanks again everyone.

  Pavel

пн, 3 нояб. 2025 г., 03:14 Jerry Weiss <j...@ieee.org>:

[Jerry Weiss]

Hi Pavel,

Nice bit of coding.   Just to be complete, the DECUS submission for which the code was Fortran, did include a SAV image.  I presume, but have not tested myself, is the compiled version of that program.  

Not having pipes in RT-11 is a bummer, but it does so many other things with low overhead, hence Real Time, I cannot fault it.    TSX+ is a terrific enhancement of RT-11, while retaining many of its programs and features.  TSX+ is available for hobbyists.  Still no pipes.

   Jerry

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[Pavel Tsybulin]

Hi Jerry,

Yeah, judging by the size of the .sav 15K (30 blocks) it's Fortran, the macro implementation is more compact.

Pavel

пн, 3 нояб. 2025 г., 23:30 Jerry Weiss <j...@ieee.org>:

[terri-...@glaver.org]

On Sunday, November 2, 2025 at 10:33:05 AM UTC-5 b...@softjar.se wrote:

However, times have moved on. RSX certainly can do paged output these
days. I *think* RSTS/E can as well. It's just RT-11 that don't. 

RSTS/E doesn't support the /PAGE qualifier to the TYPE command.

I should probably add that to my V10.1 distribution, since I have the

source code.

DCL in RSTS/E is a later (V9) add-on, since VMS standardized the

use of DCL as the new uniform command line interface across

systems. The internal implementation is completely different be-

tween VMS and RSTS/E. The RSTS/E parser treats /NO<stuff> as

an explicit negation, while in VMS it's parsed differently. There

was a sort of 'easter egg' in earlier RSTS/E V9 versions because

the /NOTIFY qualifier is not a negation. This was solved by having

a /TIFY qualifier and /NOTIFY being its negation. In those earlier

V9 releases, you could say something like "PRINT/TIFY FILE.TXT".
In later releases DCL checked for /TIFY and rejected it.