007 - Introduction to CYBIS

This Quick Reference is not an exhaustive guide to CYBIS but covers general concepts which must be understood in the operation and usage of PLATO.

Other material available on this site, and/or Bitsavers will have much more depth. Relevant documentation will be linked into these articles at appropriate places, and references to suggested lessons will be highlighted in these guides.

The guide File OPGUIDE (PLATO Operations Guide) contains an in-depth description of all PLATO operations-related activities and concepts.

Although the vast majority of the documentation is irrelevant in this modern context, the following sections should be read before proceeding:

• 1 - PLATO Overview
• 4 - PLATO Account Management
• 5 - "Runner" Lesson Management
• 12 - The PLATO Bulletin Board
• 13 - Consultant Features
• 16 - NOS job submission from PLATO
• 21 - Operations Utilities

The guide File SUPDOC (Systems Programmer's Notebook) has a considerable amount of historical value, but little value in today's operations.

In particular, the following sections should be read before proceeding:

• 4 - Group "s" Operating Procedures
• 90 - PLATO History
• 94 - PLATO Programming Standards

The CYBIS keyboard has a set of special keys not found on modern PC keyboards. For Pterm key mappings on modern keyboards click on Help and then select “Pterm keyboard”. As a mnemonic, most (but not all) of these function keys are accessible as control-x where x is the first letter of the function key name (for example, control-d for the DATA key). Note also that all the function keys except for TERM come in shifted variants. For example, control-shift-S will produce the SHIFT-STOP key.

Sometimes in documentation or help text you will see a “1” after the key name to indicate the shifted version of the key. For example STOP1 represents SHIFT-STOP.

Here is an incomplete list of some of the most important keys:

There is a range of CYBIS lessons for everyone. Invoke a lesson by typing the lesson name in the System or Author Mode screen followed by DATA.

You will see a warning from many lessons which have not yet been “condensed” saying in red: “NO BINARY – Lesson must be condensed”. It then suggests to press DATA to condense or NEXT to choose a new lesson. This is a known issue with this version. Simply press DATA and the lesson will condense and run normally.

These lessons provide general help about CYBIS, how to write Tutor lessons, the NOS operating system, how to operator CYBIS etc.:

In addition to the resident documentation, the author of The TUTOR Language, Bruce Arne Sherwood has granted the community free access to his work which may be found within the section The TUTOR Language.

To get started with Tutor programming I recommend working through the lesson introtutor Introduction to Tutor.

This reference will be of help: Summary of TUTOR Commands and System Variables

To create more lessons, sign on as user “admin”, group “s” and password “passme” and at the System Mode prompt type the account name “cybdeva” followed by NEXT. Then NEXT for “file management options” and then “1” for “Create a file”. Select option “a” to create a lesson, type the file name and NEXT and then again NEXT when prompted for “Enter masterfile” (don’t care) and “5” when prompted for “Enter number of parts”. This will give you a reasonable size lesson file to experiment with.

Continue to Operator Interface