[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[Doug McIlroy]

Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
It does not resemble the familiar layout of the numbered
editions. Besides the usual overview of kernel and shell,
it describes system calls and some commands, in a layout
unrelated to the familiar man-page style. Detailed
reference/tutorial manuals for as, roff, db and ed
are included as appendices.

The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer
of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
appears on page 1.

A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?

Doug

[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[Warren Toomey]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 08:55:36PM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
> Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
> Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
> a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
> It does not resemble the familiar layout of the numbered
> editions. Besides the usual overview of kernel and shell,
> it describes system calls and some commands, in a layout
> unrelated to the familiar man-page style. Detailed
> reference/tutorial manuals for as, roff, db and ed
> are included as appendices.
> 
> The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer
> of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
> appears on page 1.
> 
> A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
> this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?

No, I've not seen anything before Dennis' scan of the 1st
Edition manuals. Can you make a scan of this one available?

Many thanks, Warren

[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[arnold]

> > A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
> > this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?
>
> No, I've not seen anything before Dennis' scan of the 1st
> Edition manuals. Can you make a scan of this one available?

Seconded. Please? Pretty please?

Thanks!

Arnold

[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[Random832]

On 2015-11-24, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer
> of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
> appears on page 1.
>
> A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
> this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?

Is this The UNIX Time-Sharing System, or related to it? The same
claim appears in the first paragraph:

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Warren Toomey]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 08:55:36PM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
> Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
> Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
> a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.

Doug has kindly made available a scan of this document. I've placed
a copy of it into the Unix Archive at:

http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/

It's certainly an interesting read. It comes across as a mingling
of the CACM paper and the user manuals. I'd love to get a more
definite date than 1971, though.

Many thanks for this, Doug!

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Warren Toomey]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:24:13AM +1100, Warren Toomey wrote:
> It's certainly an interesting read. It comes across as a mingling
> of the CACM paper and the user manuals. I'd love to get a more
> definite date than 1971, though.

Edit: mid-1971.

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Clem cole]

Thank you both. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 28, 2015, at 9:01 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:24:13AM +1100, Warren Toomey wrote:
>> It's certainly an interesting read. It comes across as a mingling
>> of the CACM paper and the user manuals. I'd love to get a more
>> definite date than 1971, though.
> 
> Edit: mid-1971.
> 
> Cheers, Warren
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Christian Neukirchen]

Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> writes:

> On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 08:55:36PM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
>> Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
>> Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
>> a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
>
> Doug has kindly made available a scan of this document. I've placed
> a copy of it into the Unix Archive at:
>
> http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/
>
> It's certainly an interesting read.

Anyone else notice that create(2) is spelled with an "e" (Sec. 3.5.2)?
But not in the appendix A1.6...

-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirchen at gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

>> Anyone else notice that create(2) is spelled with an "e" (Sec. 3.5.2)?
>> But not in the appendix A1.6...

I did when I read UnixEditionZero.pdf this morning.  I seem to recall
Dennis or Ken being quoted as having said that the one thing they'd
do over in Unix was to spell "creat" with a final "e".

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[arnold]

> >> Anyone else notice that create(2) is spelled with an "e" (Sec. 3.5.2)?
> >> But not in the appendix A1.6...

"Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:

> I did when I read UnixEditionZero.pdf this morning.  I seem to recall
> Dennis or Ken being quoted as having said that the one thing they'd
> do over in Unix was to spell "creat" with a final "e".

It was Ken. And indeed he did so, for Plan 9.

Arnold

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[John Cowan]

Warren Toomey scripsit:

> It's certainly an interesting read. 

Some things that strike me particularly:

- the presence of only one execute bit (a file is either executable or
it isn't!)

- the "@" prompt of the shell

- the blocked paper tape driver

- the fact that ^\ causes an arbitrary non-shell process to core dump
if several are running and DEL (aka ^C) does not exist yet

- the fact that switches don't yet exist (and indeed when passing files
to the B interpreter one must precede them with a hyphen)

I also note the marginal "NO!" next to the statement that the second
argument to 'creat' is the file mode.  I wonder what that was about.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
"Make a case, man; you're full of naked assertions, just like Nietzsche."
"Oh, i suffer from that, too.  But you know, naked assertions or GTFO."
                        --heard on #scheme, sorta

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 29 Nov 2015, John Cowan wrote:

> I also note the marginal "NO!" next to the statement that the second 
> argument to 'creat' is the file mode.  I wonder what that was about.

I liked the way that fork(label) worked, although the assembler doc says 
it's a white lie...

And I think page A7 is missing.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Warren Toomey]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:24:13AM +1100, Warren Toomey wrote:
> > Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
> > Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
> > Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
> > a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
> 
> Doug has kindly made available a scan of this document.

I've just spent the evening OCR'ing it with tesseract and then hand cleaning
the output. A plain text (no formatting) version is now at:

http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero.txt

Doug, page A7 is missing. Could you e-mail in a scan of that page?

I am still amazed at how eloquent and succinct Dennis was at writing.
This document is an amazing introduction to the ideas and features of
Unix. It's a pity they didn't take this to SOSP in 1971!

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Warren Toomey]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 12:09:03AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero.txt
> 
> Doug, page A7 is missing. Could you e-mail in a scan of that page?

Doug reports in a private e-mail that the physical page A7 is missing,
so he is unable to scan it in. Oh well.

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Warren Toomey]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 12:09:03AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> > http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero.txt
> > 
> > Doug, page A7 is missing. Could you e-mail in a scan of that page?
> 
> Doug reports in a private e-mail that the physical page A7 is missing,
> so he is unable to scan it in. Oh well.

Actually, we can probably substitute part of the db(1) man page from 1st
Edition Unix for the missing page A7:

             =   When preceded by an expression, the value of the
                 expression is typed in octal. When not preceded by an
                 expression, the value of. "." is indicated. This
                 command does not change the value of ".".

             :   An attempt is made to print the given expression as a
                 symbolic address. If the expression is relocatable,
                 that symbol is found whose value is nearest that of
                 the expression, and the symbol is typed, followed by a
                 sign and the appropriate offset. If the value of the
                 expression is absolute, a symbol with exactly the
                 indicated value is sought and printed if found; if no
                 matching symbol is discovered, the octal value of the
                 expression is given.

          The following command may be used to patch the file being
          debugged.

             !   This command must be preceded by an expression. The
                 value of the expression is stored at the location
                 addressed by the current value of "." . The opcodes do
                 not appear in the symbol table, so the user must
                 assemble them by hand.


          The following command is used after a fault has caused a core
          image file to be produced.

             $   causes the contents of the general registers and
                 several other registers to be printed both in octal
                 and symbolic format. The values are as they were at
                 the time of the fault.

                  The only way to exit from db is to generate an end of file
                  on the typewriter (EOT character).

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[Larry McVoy]

I was a little tongue in cheek, but it worked, I was trying to tease
out more details about the beginning.

And I personally love troff, had to write a paper in Latex recently
and found it painful.

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:08:17AM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> 
> > It's worth noting that Unix was built for troff.  Typesetting patents
> if I recall correctly.
> 
> This is a stretch. Unix was really built because Ken and Dennis
> had a good idea. The purchase of a PDP-11 for it was in part
> justified by the goal of making a word-processing system. The
> first in-house "sale" of Unix was indeed to the patent department
> for typing patents--the selling point was that roff could be
> made (by an overnight modification) to print line numbers as
> USPTO required, whereas that was not a feature of a commercial
> competitor. The timeline is really roff--Unix--patent--nroff--troff.
> Though roff antedated Unix, it did not motivate Unix.
> 
> > Is this The UNIX Time-Sharing System, or related to it? The same
> > claim appears in the first paragraph:
> > https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html
> 
> This draft clearly dates from 1971. Pieces of it were worked
> into subsequent versions of the manual as well as published
> descriptions of Unix, including the SIGOPS/CACM paper.
> 
> Doug
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[Doug McIlroy]

> It's worth noting that Unix was built for troff.  Typesetting patents
if I recall correctly.

This is a stretch. Unix was really built because Ken and Dennis
had a good idea. The purchase of a PDP-11 for it was in part
justified by the goal of making a word-processing system. The
first in-house "sale" of Unix was indeed to the patent department
for typing patents--the selling point was that roff could be
made (by an overnight modification) to print line numbers as
USPTO required, whereas that was not a feature of a commercial
competitor. The timeline is really roff--Unix--patent--nroff--troff.
Though roff antedated Unix, it did not motivate Unix.

> Is this The UNIX Time-Sharing System, or related to it? The same
> claim appears in the first paragraph:
> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html

This draft clearly dates from 1971. Pieces of it were worked
into subsequent versions of the manual as well as published
descriptions of Unix, including the SIGOPS/CACM paper.

Doug

[TUHS] "Edition 0" manual

[Doug McIlroy]

> I've not seen anything before Dennis' scan of the 1st
> Edition manuals. Can you make a scan of this one available?

I shall, as I had intended to do if this document was as
unknown or forgotten by others as it was by me.

Doug