🚀 go-pugleaf

>From Mishkin@YALE Thu Jun  3 01:14:55 1982
I fully sympathize with your painful experience trying to bring up
bogus software.  In case it is still not clear:  Z runs on unmodified
TOPS-20 systems as well as on our own modified monitor.  I completely
agree with you that exporting (or "exporting") software which has
bizarre monitor dependencies is totally unacceptable.

I can not comment on earlier generations of Yale hackers from which
the present Tools (incl.  Z) work is totally divorced.  However, we
have strived very hard to make our software robust and exportable.
Every single tool we send out is documented.  All our code is written
in a high level language (Bliss; higher than MACRO anyway) and uses
a shared runtime library.  Z is terminal independent and it is very
easy to add new terminal types to Z since it uses a termcap-like
facility (i.e. it uses terminal descriptor files).

In characterizing our "isolation" I should have mentioned that, to a
certain extent, in retrospect we consider this a boon:  had we been
on the net, we probably would have absorbed that large set of random
programs written in MACRO instead of developing a coherent set of
utilities and a environment for writing them.

                -- Nat