[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Doug McIlroy]

> It might not be so much a set of macros as just using a
> subset of raw groff.

Yes, there were no macros back then. If you format the
document using raw groff, the odds are that you will be
speaking the same roff that Dennis did.

>  Doug having been there, might know/remember the actually lineage.

Aside from some fuzziness about who wrote what and in what 
language, here's what happened:

To port Jerry Saltzer's Runoff (presumably written in MAD)
to Multics, either Dennis or Bob Morris or both together
reimplemented it (presumably in PL/I). To coexist with
Saltzer's version on CTSS, the new program needed a 
distinct name, hence roff.

The early Multics PL/I compiler was far from a production
tool. Justifiably, the Bell Labs comp center didn't
support it. To get roff into general use at the Labs,
I undertook yet another implementation in BCPL. I added
functionality (number registers, three-part headings, etc)
and kept the new name. Molly Wagner added hyphenation.
Eventually, I added macros that were usable either as
commands or (when parameterless) embedded in text.

Almost as soon as Unix was up on the PDP-11 one of Ken, Dennis
or Ossanna reimplemented a pre-macro version of roff (presumably
in assembler or B). I'm quite sure roff never ran on the PDP-7.

Ossana had a grander plan and undertook nroff. When he learned
of the availability of the Graphic Systems CAT phototypesetter,
he promptly generalized nroff to handle it. Joe replaced the
CAT's paper tape reader with a direct wire to the computer.
It all worked swimmingly--nothing like the travails when the
CAT was replaced by the more capable Merganthaler Linotron.

An interesting question of priority is whether nroff or
BCPL roff was first to have a macro capability. Though
I don't remember for sure, the fact that BCPL roff unified
registers, macros, strings and diversions suggests that
I abstracted from nroff facilities.

Doug

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Charles Anthony]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > It might not be so much a set of macros as just using a
> > subset of raw groff.
>
> Yes, there were no macros back then. If you format the
> document using raw groff, the odds are that you will be
> speaking the same roff that Dennis did.
>
> >  Doug having been there, might know/remember the actually lineage.
>
> Aside from some fuzziness about who wrote what and in what
> language, here's what happened:
>
> To port Jerry Saltzer's Runoff (presumably written in MAD)
> to Multics, either Dennis or Bob Morris or both together
> reimplemented it (presumably in PL/I). To coexist with
> Saltzer's version on CTSS, the new program needed a
> distinct name, hence roff.
>
> The early Multics PL/I compiler was far from a production
> tool. Justifiably, the Bell Labs comp center didn't
> support it. To get roff into general use at the Labs,
> I undertook yet another implementation in BCPL. I added
> functionality (number registers, three-part headings, etc)
> and kept the new name. Molly Wagner added hyphenation.
> Eventually, I added macros that were usable either as
> commands or (when parameterless) embedded in text.
>
>
From Multics 12.5:

runoff_mr1.bcpl

//                  Roff for MULTICS
//
//  The first ROFF for Multics was written in March, 1969, by
//  Doug McIlroy of Bell Labs.  Art Evans made extensive
//  modifications to it in May and June, 1969, adding many
//  comments and making various changes.
//  Footnoting added by Dennis Capps in 1970.
//  Maintained by Harwell Thrasher in 1971.
//  Many new features added and bugs fixed by R Mabee in 1971-1972.
//  RUNOFF and BCPL were brought over to the 6180 Multics (from 645) in May
of 1973 by R F Mabee.


The string 'macro" does not appear in the Multics runoff source.




> An interesting question of priority is whether nroff or
> BCPL roff was first to have a macro capability. Though
> I don't remember for sure, the fact that BCPL roff unified
> registers, macros, strings and diversions suggests that
> I abstracted from nroff facilities.
>
> Doug
>

-- Charles
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[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Marc Rochkind]

Nelson--

Well, maybe CP/M and MS-DOS were less powerful, but you're forgetting that
they had the benefit of 10 years or so of additional evolution. ;-)

--Marc

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 11:20 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > It might not be so much a set of macros as just using a
> > subset of raw groff.
>
> Yes, there were no macros back then. If you format the
> document using raw groff, the odds are that you will be
> speaking the same roff that Dennis did.
>
> >  Doug having been there, might know/remember the actually lineage.
>
> Aside from some fuzziness about who wrote what and in what
> language, here's what happened:
>
> To port Jerry Saltzer's Runoff (presumably written in MAD)
> to Multics, either Dennis or Bob Morris or both together
> reimplemented it (presumably in PL/I). To coexist with
> Saltzer's version on CTSS, the new program needed a
> distinct name, hence roff.
>
> The early Multics PL/I compiler was far from a production
> tool. Justifiably, the Bell Labs comp center didn't
> support it. To get roff into general use at the Labs,
> I undertook yet another implementation in BCPL. I added
> functionality (number registers, three-part headings, etc)
> and kept the new name. Molly Wagner added hyphenation.
> Eventually, I added macros that were usable either as
> commands or (when parameterless) embedded in text.
>
> Almost as soon as Unix was up on the PDP-11 one of Ken, Dennis
> or Ossanna reimplemented a pre-macro version of roff (presumably
> in assembler or B). I'm quite sure roff never ran on the PDP-7.
>
> Ossana had a grander plan and undertook nroff. When he learned
> of the availability of the Graphic Systems CAT phototypesetter,
> he promptly generalized nroff to handle it. Joe replaced the
> CAT's paper tape reader with a direct wire to the computer.
> It all worked swimmingly--nothing like the travails when the
> CAT was replaced by the more capable Merganthaler Linotron.
>
> An interesting question of priority is whether nroff or
> BCPL roff was first to have a macro capability. Though
> I don't remember for sure, the fact that BCPL roff unified
> registers, macros, strings and diversions suggests that
> I abstracted from nroff facilities.
>
> Doug
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
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[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[John Cowan]

Doug McIlroy scripsit:

> To port Jerry Saltzer's Runoff (presumably written in MAD)

Also the ancestor, by the way, of the various DEC runoff programs; I used
them a bit back in the day on the PDP-8 and -11.  Checking, I now see
that PDP-8 runoff was not a CUSP, but someone else's reimplementation
of RUNOFF-10, probably distributed by DECUS.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
But the next day there came no dawn, and the Grey Company passed on
into the darkness of the Storm of Mordor and were lost to mortal sight;
but the Dead followed them.          --"The Passing of the Grey Company"

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Doug McIlroy]

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

That would be appropriate--properly documented, of course.

doug

[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] 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, 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

[Random832]

On 2015-12-02, shawn wilson wrote:
> I would assume you'd want a format you could overlay an image of each page
> on as the typeface and whatnot are cool to see.

One thing that might be worth doing is seeing if we can "perfectly"
replicate the output and actually use it instead of the OCR
results as the invisible text layer of the PDF.

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[shawn wilson]

On Dec 1, 2015 7:44 PM, "Random832" <random832 at fastmail.us> wrote:
>

> It'd be period-appropriate to use roff, which might well be what he
> originally wrote it in... or nroff might be more accessible for
> modern users.
>

Planning on making a man page out of it?

I would assume you'd want a format you could overlay an image of each page
on as the typeface and whatnot are cool to see.
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[Random832]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015, at 17:29, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Can someone point me to the URL for it, please?  I could be
> interested, as \x11 I'm a pedantic bugger.

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

The 2.5MB version is fine. I also went ahead and created a github
repository with what I have so far (a couple pages cleaned up, first
page has justification and hyphenation reapplied, and the rest just has
a few global search fixes and some things I spotted running it through
spell before I gave up on that approach).

https://github.com/Random832/McIlroy_v0/

> And what format would you suggest?  I can do -ms and RTF, but I'm not
> familiar with LaTex etc.

Well, just fixing up the text would be a start, maybe along with
some notation of what's underlined, subscripts, etc, so we can come
back to it.

It'd be period-appropriate to use roff, which might well be what he
originally wrote it in... or nroff might be more accessible for
modern users.

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 1 Dec 2015, Random832 wrote:

> Anyone have any thoughts on a collaborative effort to hand-correct it 
> from the OCR output into a readable format?

Can someone point me to the URL for it, please?  I could be interested, as 
I'm a pedantic bugger.

And what format would you suggest?  I can do -ms and RTF, but I'm not 
familiar with LaTex etc.

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

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Random832]

Anyone have any thoughts on a collaborative effort to hand-correct it
from the OCR output into a readable format?

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Warren Toomey]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 586 bytes --]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 08:55:23PM -0800, Paul McJones wrote:
> Thanks very much for making the original and the OCR-enhanced versions
> of Doug’s scan of the “UnixEditionZero” document available
> on tuhs.org. I notice that even with Nelson’s enhanced version,
> the file size is still large for a scanned text document, apparently
> because it was originally scanned in RGB mode, 24 bits/pixel. The
> attached version is 2.5MB, and to my eye is identical looks identical
> to UnixEditionZero-OCR.pdf.

Paul, I've added your version into the same directory. Thanks!

	Warren

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Warren Toomey]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:51:19AM -0700, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> Thanks, Doug and Warren, for the new files at
> 
> 	http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/
> 
> At the TUHS mirror at my site, you can find an additional file 
> 
> 	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero-OCR.pdf
> 	ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero-OCR.pdf
> 
> that is less than half the size, and is (somewhat) searchable, thanks
> to Adobe Acrobat Pro 11 OCR conversion.  Please include that in the
> TUHS master archive, even renaming it to the original file, if you
> wish.

Thanks Nelson. I've placed your OCR'd file in the same location as
Doug's original file.

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Thanks, Doug and Warren, for the new files at

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

At the TUHS mirror at my site, you can find an additional file 

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero-OCR.pdf
	ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero-OCR.pdf

that is less than half the size, and is (somewhat) searchable, thanks
to Adobe Acrobat Pro 11 OCR conversion.  Please include that in the
TUHS master archive, even renaming it to the original file, if you
wish.

I like the beginning of "Section 2. Hardware", where Dennis wrote:

>> ...
>> The PDP-11 on which UNIX is implemented is a 16-bit 12K computer,
>> and UNIX occupies 8K words. More than half of this space, however, is
>> utilized for a variable number of disk buffers; with some loss of
>> speed the number of buffers could be cut significantly.
>> ...

How much more powerful early Unix was compared to CP/M and MS-DOS, in
a small fraction of their memory space!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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

[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

[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

[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