Educational Technology Center UNIX environment
Beware: this index page is under construction!
Although ETC started using the UNIX environment around 1983 (at which
time only a VAX 750 was available), the use was mostly for documentation,
electronic mail communications, and the start of the Center's archives
(with some leeway for usage of personal accounts). Little or none
of the Center's programming work was done under UNIX.
~archive is the central account in which sources and documentation
have been archived. As of 1994, its full path is
madeleine.ics.uci.edu:/cg/ub/archive. Its documentation directory,
~archive/documentation, is generally accessible; indeed, it is this
directory which this local web serves.
Dialogue creation using UNIX
Starting around 1989-90, a long-held desire of the Center's to obtain
on-line representation of our central instructional-design semi-formalism,
known as scripts, began to be realised, in 2 different
projects. One local one, with an exploratory prototype implemented on
PC's, tried to implement a representation which could possibly be
interpreted directly; the other, IDEAL (listed below), from the University
of Geneva, runs on Sun workstations
under X-Windows. It intends code (Pascal, Ada, etc.) to be generated
starting from the on-line script, and it provides tools for automating
as much of the initial coding as possible.
Since the necessary procedure locally at this date is to implement the
dialogues in Turbo Pascal under DOS, this implies an increasing distribution
of development across the DOS/UNIX barrier -- likely to place increasing
dependence on PC-NFS, or other UNIX-to-PC networking tools.
Important items in this new arrangement include:
UNIX software help
General advice:
a considerable amount of useful software can
be found under UNIX, if one knows likely ways for finding it. A fairly
simple way to start is to use the keyword search capacity of the UNIX
"manual" program, man. It can then be applied to likely
keywords that describe the kinds of task needed. For example:
- man -k postscript for a list of manual entries describing
programs that have "postscript" in their descriptions.
- man -k format if looking for programs to format text.
One then explores more finely the list of entries returned (the search on
"format", for instance, will probably have returned several entries that
have nothing to do with text).
It's also useful to explore various of the directories that your
$PATH variable names, as program names can often be found there
which look of possible interest; for each such program, its "man" page
can be read.
Note that the "man" pages are often far from ideal! But they do
provide a strong starting point, at least, for working with many of
the programs.
vi.notes
is a succinct guide to the commands for the "vi" text editor under UNIX.
It's organised roughly with the most commonly-used commands placed first.
(The other main text editor under UNIX at ICS, emacs, was essentially
unused by the project at the time this guide was written, so we have
nothing concerning it.)
A relatively brief reference on the rather old itroff
phototypesetting program -- mostly supplanted in more recent
documentation by LaTex.
The
UPSls manual, for an unofficial version of the p-System that was
briefly hosted under UNIX. This was possible because a former member
of the UCSD Pascal project at UCSD, Dennis Volper, was at ICS at this
period.
Miscellaneous documents on other UNIX usage
UCInet.connections, an old document describing the Dataswitch
connection to the "UCInet", the set of campus ethernets.