*start*
00752 00024 UU 
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 83 11:43 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Click the "Display" command for Laurel 6.1 documentation
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

This series of messages contains everything that Laurel 6 users should need to know in order to run Laurel 6.1.  It assumes that you already know how to use Laurel.  For anything not covered here, you should continue to refer to the Laurel Manual.

The name of this mail file is Laurel61.mail.  It may be selected by starting Laurel with the command "Laurel Laurel61", or by clicking the Mail file command, filling in the brackets with "Laurel61", and striking ESC.

Click the Display command to read the next and subsequent messages.

*start*
02326 00024 UU 
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 83 11:43 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Installing Laurel
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

This message is for people who haven't installed Laurel 6.1 yet.  If you have already installed Laurel 6.1 (following the instructions in the release message), you should skip this message.

All the files needed to run Laurel are stored in the <Laurel> directory on the following file servers:

	Aztec, Cactus, Erie, Ice, Isis, Ivy, Jaws, Oly, Rain,
	RoseBowl, Urchin, Walden

To install the new Laurel, first make sure you have at least 120 free pages on your disk (the new Laurel is larger than the old, and the installation procedure also retrieves a Laurel 6.1 documentation file to your disk).  Use FTP to retrieve the file <Laurel>Laurel.cm from one of the above servers.  Then Quit to the Executive and issue the command:

	> @Laurel.cm

This will obtain the new version of Laurel itself, as well as updated versions of any Laurel-runnable programs already present on your disk.  When it is finished, it will start Laurel.  The current mail file will contain a series of messages documenting the changes in Laurel 6.1 (see below).

Note to alpha testers: if you have been running one of the Laurel 6.1T3x test versions, you should convert to Laurel 6.1 at this time.  Thank you for your help in shaking down the new software.

Note to Cholla users: there will be a release of Cholla that corresponds to Laurel 6.1, but it is not ready yet.  You should await a separate Cholla announcement.

For normal use, Laurel 6.1's user interface is nearly identical to Laurel 6's; so you should have no difficulty getting started.  However, there are some important changes that you should be aware of, especially if you use private distribution lists or correspond with ARPA users.

Complete documentation is stored in the mail file <Laurel>Laurel61.mail on any of the above-mentioned file servers.  We suggest that you read this documentation at your earliest convenience.  The installation procedure retrieves this file to your disk and starts Laurel displaying it.  If you would like to have hardcopy, select all the messages in the table of contents and click the Hardcopy command.  When you are finished with these messages, you may delete them.

*start*
04796 00024 UU 
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 83 11:43 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Changes to message format
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

Laurel now supports the new ARPA header standard (RFC 822).  This means that Laurel understands only those messages conforming to the standard, and will allow you to send only messages that conform.  Fortunately, the new format is nearly a subset of the old one, and is identical in most cases that matter.  The main differences to pay attention to are as follows:

-- All name-containing fields are now required to contain real mailbox names; formerly it was permissible for the From field to consist entirely of arbitrary text if a Sender field was present.  That is,

	From: The Laurel Implementors

is no longer legal; an actual mailbox must be named, e.g.,

	From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>

It continues to be true that a Sender field must be present if the sender's name differs from the mailbox named in the From field; Laurel will insert a Sender field automatically when needed.

-- The syntax for ARPA recipient names is generalized to "recipient@domain", where the domain is a hierarchical name whose root is usually "ARPA".  For example, "Joe.Blow@CMUA.ARPA" designates the recipient named Joe.Blow in the CMUA sub-domain of the ARPA domain.  Currently this naming scheme maps more-or-less directly onto the old "user@host" scheme; but it is evolving in the direction of a more general hierarchical name structure that resembles (not accidentally) the ones used in the Xerox Grapevine and Clearinghouse systems.

One restriction you should be aware of is that the local-part of ARPA recipient names (the part to the left of the "@") may not contain spaces or certain other punctuation characters unless they are quoted.  If Laurel complains about the syntax of an ARPA recipient name, try putting quotes around the local-part; for example:

	To: "Joe Blow"@CMUA.ARPA

-- The word " at " is no longer equivalent to "@" in ARPA recipient names.

-- The new Laurel has no special knowledge of ARPA mailbox names except that appearance of "@" in a name causes it to be treated as a member of the AG registry (AG stands for "ARPA Gateway", but you never need to specify it).  Furthermore, the ARPA host name PARC-MAXC is no longer treated specially.  This is in order to decouple Laurel from any future changes to ARPA name syntax or to the way in which the Xerox and ARPA internets are connected.

This means that it's no longer necessary or even desirable to append
"@PARC-MAXC" to Xerox R-Names in the headers of messages you send (even in the From or Reply-to field).  Doing so may result in messages taking unnecessary hops through Maxc.

A consequence of this change is that the Answer command may be confused by formerly legal headers that depended on ARPA name minimization algorithms, which have been eliminated.  For example, the header:

	From: Brotz@PARC-MAXC
	To: Foo

will be answered as:

	To: Brotz@PARC-MAXC
	cc: Foo.AG

since the new parser understands that the sender was in the AG registry, and therefore Foo must have been shorthand for Foo.AG.  Such cases should be rare, and will disappear altogether when everyone is using new versions of Laurel, Hardy, etc.

-- The syntax for specifying a private distribution list -- "@FileName" -- has been changed.  This was never part of the old ARPA standard, and unfortunately it conflicts with the syntax for specifying source routing information in the new standard.

The new way to designate a private distribution list employs the ARPA standard's "group" syntax.  Instead of writing:

	To: @MyFriends.dl

you should write either:

	To: MyFriends.dl: ;
 or:	To: MyFriends.dl: name1, name2, ... nameN;

The first form leaves the members of the list unspecified in the header.  When you send the message, Laurel will expand MyFriends.dl to obtain the names of the recipients (but won't modify the message header).

The second form lists the individual members.  This list, of course, may be easily filled in by expanding the name of the list, using the COM-G command.  Sending a message to recipients named in this way does not cause any distribution list expansion, since the names are already listed in the header.

If the name of the private distribution list contains special characters (brackets, commas, and a few others) then it must be quoted; e.g.,

	To: "[Ivy]<MyName>MyFriends.dl": ;

Note that this change applies only to PRIVATE distribution lists.  Public lists, e.g., MesaUsers^.pa, will continue to be treated as ordinary names.

-- There are also changes in certain fields that are generated automatically by Laurel, e.g., Date and In-reply-to.  Laurel has been changed to conform to the new standard.

*start*
03839 00024 UU 
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 83 12:52 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Other functional changes
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

-- CR insertion in Deliver.  Laurel 6.1 no longer automatically inserts carriage returns in messages being sent.  The only CRs present will be the ones you put in explicitly.  This enables messages to be properly formatted when displayed in windows of various widths, which is important in view of the increasing diversity of mail handling programs.

Messages sent to ARPA recipients will have CRs inserted automatically as they pass through the Xerox-to-ARPA gateway on Maxc; this is necessary because a number of ARPA mail programs are incapable of properly displaying messages containing arbitrary-length "lines".  If you are sure that the recipients will not object, you may defeat the automatic CR insertion by including the field:

	Line-fold: No

somewhere in the header of the message.

-- Blue button New mail.  Ordinarily, the "New mail" command retrieves all messages pending in your in-box as a single, indivisible operation.  If there is more mail in your in-box than will fit on your local disk (as sometimes occurs if you haven't run Laurel for a long time), then "New mail" will fail to retrieve any mail at all.  If you encounter this situation, click "New mail" with the blue (right) button.  This will retrieve messages and delete them from the in-box one at a time until either your in-box is empty or your local disk is full, at which point it will stop and let you process the messages received so far.  This method of retrieving new mail is much slower than the normal method, so you should use it only if you have to.  (Fine point: this works for in-boxes stored on Grapevine servers, but not ones on IFSs or Maxc.)

-- Mail file format.  Laurel now inserts special characters into mail files to enable scrolling and display of messages to be performed substantially faster.  This means that it is no longer reasonable to read mail files using Bravo or other programs.  The correct way to move messages into a file that other programs can read is to copy them into the composition window and then store them with the Put command.

-- Performance.  The internals of Laurel have been extensively reorganized, mainly to enable it to serve as the foundation for the Cholla process control system.  Consequently, the performance of Laurel 6.1 is perceptibly different from that of Laurel 6.  On machines with extended memory (most Alto-IIs and all Dolphins and Dorados), Laurel 6.1's performance is generally better than Laurel 6's.  But on machines with only 64K words of memory (all Alto-Is and certain early Alto-IIs), performance is somewhat poorer.  We have recently expended considerable effort making Laurel 6.1 run better on 64K machines, and we believe it is usable even though not wonderful.

A new Laurel.profile option, DisplayLines, has been introduced.  It determines the height of the display in text lines; the default value is "DisplayLines: 60".  On a 64K Alto, decreasing this by even a few lines improves performance noticeably, because decreasing the display area makes more memory available for other purposes and thereby reduces the amount of disk swapping activity.

You should be aware that there are several conditions that can prevent Laurel from taking advantage of extended memory even if the machine has some.  If you are running on an Alto-II which you believe has extended memory, and Laurel 6.1 seems unreasonably slow compared to Laurel 6, this may be the reason.  If your machine is an Alto-II, you should be sure to read the message entitled "Laurel 6.1 on Alto-II".

The new Laurel runnable program What.laurel will display a definitive report of what Laurel believes the machine configuration is.

*start*
05980 00024 UU 
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 83 11:43 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Changes to Laurel runnable programs
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

There have been some changes (mostly additions) to the programs you can invoke with Laurel's Run command.  These programs are available from the same directory from which you obtained Laurel itself; all have the extension ".laurel".

Note to alpha testers: if you changed the RunPath in your Laurel.profile to something like:

	RunPath: [xxx]<Laurel>6.1T38>

where xxx is the name of your local file server, then you should now change it back to its normal value:

	RunPath: [xxx]<Laurel>

The following programs are functionally the same as the ones for Laurel 6, though you will still need to obtain new versions for 6.1 (this is done automatically by the installation procedure in Laurel.cm).

	Chat.laurel
	Files.laurel
	MailFileScavenger.laurel
	Maintain.laurel
	PupHacks.laurel

The program InsertMail.laurel has been renamed Insert.laurel, but is otherwise the same.

The following programs are new.  This is the sole documentation.

-- Extract.laurel behaves like SearchMail.laurel except that it copies the matching text into the composed message.  With an imaginative search specification, this program can generate amazing reports and summaries.

-- LineSort.laurel sorts a file full of text lines into order.  It requests an input file and an output file.  It also asks whether to sort by "first words" or by "markers".  First words means that the first word of each line is used as the sort key.  Markers means that LineSort searches each line for a piece of text enclosed in 

brackets (control-A and control-B, perhaps entered by means of COM-B), and uses that text as the sort key.  If a line does not contain brackets, the first word is used.

-- Replace.laurel is like Insert.laurel except that it replaces the message(s) currently selected in the table of contents rather than inserting after them.

-- What.laurel displays Laurel's idea of your machine's type and configuration.

The following new programs are unsupported and are released on a "use at your own risk" basis.  They have not been as carefully polished or as well tested as the supported software.  Some of them may not work on 64K Altos.  These programs are being made available in the hope that some people may find them useful.  LaurelSupport is not maintaining them, so don't bother to report problems with them.

-- Basic.laurel is a fairly complete implementation of the Basic language.  There is no documentation other than the on-line help message (invoked by the Help command); but if you are already familiar with Basic you should have no difficulty using this one.

Basic is too large to run on a 64K Alto.  If you find that Basic has trouble doing arithmetic, it's probably because floating point operations aren't being executed properly by your machine.  On an Alto-II XM, this occurs if obsolete ROM1 Mesa microcode is installed; fixing this requires making a hardware change to the Alto.  On a Dolphin, this occurs if you don't have the correct Alto/Mesa microcode installed on the disk; if you don't know how to install microcode, consult the person who helped set up your Dolphin originally.

-- Flush.laurel retrieves and discards the contents of your in-box, leaving it empty.  This is useful primarily for administrators to clean up after users who never read their mail.

-- Groups.laurel performs set union, subtraction, intersection, and closure expansion on both Grapevine groups and private distribution lists.  Documentation may be found in file <Laurel>Groups.doc.  (This program was recently contributed by Ron <Newman.es>.)

-- Kal.laurel displays a pretty kaleidoscope pattern in the displayed message window.  Kal does not work on 64K Altos.

-- NameMatch.laurel searches the Grapevine data base (slowly!) for R-Names matching some pattern.

-- Print.laurel generates hardcopy of files on your local disk or on a file server; the file may be an existing Press file, plain-text file, or Bravo file.  Documentation may be found in file <Laurel>Print.doc.  (This program was contributed by Ken <Pier.pa>.)

-- SortMail.laurel prompts for an output file name (you must specify the ".mail" extension explicitly), and produces a version of Laurel's current mail file (the one named in the Mail file brackets) sorted by date.

-- RemoteTTY.laurel enables you to access your Laurel from any terminal in the Research Internet, including a home terminal dialled-in to a DLS.  To set up Laurel to be accessed remotely, simply run RemoteTTY; it will turn the screen blank except for a little picture of a telephone.  At this point you may connect to your machine (by name or internet address) from the DLS or from any machine running Chat.

When you connect, you are first required to type your password (terminated by ESC).  You may now issue commands to a simple command interpreter (type "?" for a summary).  You have complete access to all the mail files on your disk; and you may retrieve messages from your in-box and send new messages.

The one thing that isn't entirely obvious is how to send messages.  At all times there exists a "composed message", just as in regular Laurel.  To modify it, you invoke an editor with the "E" command.  This editor is quite different from Laurel's, and is patterned after Tenex TECO; if you're not familiar with TECO, you'd better get advice from someone who is.  To leave the editor, type "EX" followed by ESC.  You may now use the "S" command to send the composed message (the same as Laurel's "Deliver" command).

When you return to your machine and wish to regain local control, type your password followed by ESC.  RemoteTTY will terminate and the regular Laurel display will reappear.

-- LocalTTY.laurel is a "local" version of RemoteTTY.  It enables you to practice with RemoteTTY's facilities without leaving your own machine.

*start*
01487 00024 UU 
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 83 11:43 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Known remaining problems
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

There are several known problems in Laurel 6.1 that are impractical to fix for one reason or another.  There is no point in reporting these.

-- Laurel occasionally loses keystrokes during typein, especially on 64K Altos.  This is due to a long-standing bug in the Alto/Mesa system, which is no longer being maintained (the last release was nearly 3 years ago).  This problem occurred in Laurel 6 as well, but is slightly more noticeable in Laurel 6.1 because of increased code swapping activity on 64K machines.

-- Laurel does not always recover gracefully from running out of disk space.  The major operations that consume disk space, such as "New mail", "Move to", and "Put", do recover correctly.  However, Laurel also requires temporary disk storage while editing and at certain other times; and it may break if it can't get it.  It is prudent not to let the number of free disk pages fall below about 50.

-- Programs that you invoke with the Run command are not very well synchronized with the rest of Laurel.  If you manually invoke some operation that conflicts with something the Laurel runnable program is doing (for example, scroll the typescript while the program is appending text to it, or change the table of contents selection while Insert is running), you may cause Laurel to break.

*start*
03016 00024 UU 
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 83 12:50 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Laurel 6.1 on Alto-II
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

If you run Laurel on an Alto-II, please read on; otherwise disregard this message.

This is an elaboration on the "Performance" section of the "Other functional changes" message.  Laurel 6.1 is much more sensitive than Laurel 6 to the amount of memory present in the machine it is running on.  The performance of Laurel 6.1 on a 64K Alto (any Alto-I or certain early Alto-IIs) is not as good as Laurel 6's.  We are sorry, but there is no practical way of improving this state of affairs; 64K words are just not quite enough for a program of Laurel's size and complexity.  If you have a 64K Alto and you are dissatisfied with the performance of Laurel 6.1, you should experiment with changing the DisplayLines parameter, as described in the message entitled "Other functional changes".

A number of users have reported that Laurel 6.1 is significantly slower than Laurel 6 even when running on Alto-IIs that are believed to have extended memory (more than 64K).  This is almost certainly due to the way in which the Alto is configured; and there IS something you can do about it.

In order for Laurel (and other Mesa programs) to take advantage of extended memory, not only must there actually be more than 64K of memory, but also the correct "extended memory Mesa microcode" must be installed in the Alto's second bank of microinstruction PROMs.  (Or the Alto must have a 3K RAM board; but there aren't very many of those.)

In order to determine your machine's configuration, you should use Laurel's Run command to invoke the program What.laurel.  It will display something like this:

  memConfig = [AltoType: AltoIIXM, xmMicroCode: FALSE, useXM: FALSE,
  controlStore: Ram0, banks: 100000B, mesaMicrocodeVersion: 41];
  disC.bitmapInMDS = TRUE; dsD.machineFlavor = alto;

If AltoType is AltoIIXM then your machine has extended memory.  However, if xmMicroCode is FALSE then the extended memory Mesa microcode is not installed and Laurel cannot take advantage of the extended memory.

If your Alto is configured like this, you should ask your hardware support staff to install Mesa6 PROMs (or XMesa5 PROMs) in the ROM1 positions on your Alto's control board, and to exchange the SW1K and SW2K PROMs so that SW2K is in position 51.  When this is done correctly, What.laurel will report:

  memConfig = [AltoType: AltoIIXM, xmMicroCode: TRUE, useXM: TRUE,
  controlStore: RamandRom, banks: 140000B, mesaMicrocodeVersion: 41];
  disC.bitmapInMDS = FALSE; dsD.machineFlavor = alto;

(The "banks" and "mesaMicrocodeVersion" may be different than given here, but the others will be exactly as shown.)

By doing this, you will be rewarded with very substantially improved performance when running Laurel (and other Mesa programs).  Nearly everything will work faster, and the incidence of dropped keystrokes will be reduced or eliminated.

*start*
00544 00024 UU 
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 83 11:43 PDT
From: The Laurel Implementors <LaurelSupport.PA>
Subject: Reporting problems
PrintForm: Archive
Reply-to: LaurelSupport.PA

If you encounter any problems with Laurel 6.1 or with the Laurel runnable programs that are supported, please notify LaurelSupport.PA as usual.  You should mention that you are running Laurel 6.1; we will no longer respond to reports about Laurel 6.  Bug reports generated automatically by Laurel contain this version information already.

	The Laurel Implementors