This Quick Reference is not a complete guide to CYBIS but barely skims the surface and reflects the author’s superficial knowledge of CYBIS. It aims to get the user of this CYBIS release started. It only covers “System Mode” and “Author Mode” and ignores Student and Instructor Modes.

Other material available from Bitsavers and/or Controlfreaks websites will have much more depth.

Included with this release are two text files “Plato Installation Manual.txt” and “Plato Operator Guide.txt”. Both provide detailed background information for administrators and operators.

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.:

To help new authors to get started I have created 2 minimal lessons (“mytut1” and “mytut2) under account “cybdeva”. To edit and use these lessons sign in with one of the “author” type accounts (“author”, “author1”, “author2” or “author3”) using group “author” and password “passme”.

Once signed in at the author prompt type “mytut1” (or “mytut2”) and NEXT to edit the lesson. Press HELP to learn about editing. To condense and run the lesson from within the edit environment press SHIFT-STOP. To run the lesson from the author mode prompt type the lesson name and then press DATA.

To get started with Tutor programming I recommend working through “Introduction to Tutor” and for more in-depth coverage “The Tutor Language 1978”.

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.

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