[TUHS] when did new awk first appear?

[arnold@skeeve.com (Aharon Robbins)]

Hi All.  Thanks for the responses.  BWK's awk is available from his home
page at Princeton, http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk, click on the link
for the Bell Labs mirror and keep going.

The FreeBSD awk is based on BWK's, with a number of fixes / improvements,
but I don't know how frequently they sync with his version; the most
recent on BWK's home page is from May 2010.

I asked BWK when it was first released to the world but he doesn't
remember if it was SVR3.1 or SVR3.2.  The FIXES file in the source says
the book on awk went to the printer in August 1987 and I remember that
it was October 1987 when I bought the book.  I suppose I should try to
double check if it says that awk is available with Unix from AT&T; if
it does then that probably points at SVR3.1. (Anyone know the official
release dates for 3.1 and 3.2?  That might help.)

The gawk doc has said 3.1 since forever, but recently I started to wonder.
Nevertheless, since I wrote that much closer to when it happened, maybe I
should just trust my past self and not worry about it too much.  :-)

BWK first released his awk publicly circa 1993; I have about 20 different
versions, which I think comprise all the public releases he's made over
the years, but I can't be sure that I didn't miss any, since he doesn't
notify me when he makes a release :-(.

Thanks,

Arnold