[no subject]

[Howard I. Cannon <HIC at MIT-MC>]

cc: BUG-LISPM at MIT-AI

    Date: 15 September 1980 21:16-EDT
    From: NLG.SHIPMAN at MIT-AI
    To:   BUG-LISPM at MIT-AI

    In system 40.1 spire, with microcode 684, on LISP Machine Twelve:

    I finally got around to trying the TOPS-20 stuff -- 2 bugs:

    1) If you try to login 8 or 9 times in a row, every other one gets a "Connection went into
    illegal state" error. 
This is because LOGOUT is broken in that world.  That bug has been fixed in the source.

    Perhaps more significant:
    2) The default filename (in the editor) was "QFILE > LMIO AI: THIRD:" when I tried to dired
    or read in a file, for example "SPEECH:<NLG.SHIPMAN>MAIL.TXT", the filename that got
    created was "SPEECH:THIRD:<NLG.SHIPMAN>MAIL.TXT" with a consequent error message telling me
    that two devices had been specified.
How did the THIRD: get in there?  Didn't you have to type it explicitly when
you read the file (or wrote the file)?  If you did so, then of course it defaulted
to that (it can't really read minds).  If it managed to get third out of a magic
hat somewhere, I'd like to know how.  If you think this is the wrong behaviour, then
the only other option is for the ITS filename stuff to "know" about these pseudo-disk
devices (like SECOND, THIRD, and VISION for AI, and SECOND, THIRD, and FOURTH for MC). 
This knowledge seems ad hoc, but perhaps gives the user more of a feature.

    And a third one:
    3) When I tried to send this bug report, FS:FILE-DEFAULT-HOST was bound to "SPEECH"; so
    when I hit to mail, I got an error from the speech-closure complaining about the 
    ITS filename format.
This is a bug in the mail stuff, which either should be made to know about TOPS-20
(probably harder), or it could check to see whether the default host was an
ITS, and if not, it could just use AI.

    Continuing:
    4) So I did a (SETQ FS:FILE-DEFAULT-HOST "AI") and hit again. This time it complained
    that I had logged in as "somebody else". So I did a (SETQ FS:USER-ID "SHIPMN") and crossed
    my fingers.
Well, this is due to the well known problem that if you give a name longer than 6 characters
the ITS end loses.  Sigh, I guess this is a problem if your login ID on TOPS-20 and
ITS are different.  I will have to think about this one some more.

Thanks for your bug reports.