[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>]

Al Kossow wrote:

> I have volume 2 of the published version 0-03-061742-1 and\u00A0
> 0-03-061742-x on bitsavers
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition

Thank you for this very interesting bit!  My observations:

* It would have been impossible for this entire book to be troffed in
the same timeframe on the same setup.  In the font sample on page 226
(original page number, PDF page 235) the \(sq character is hollow in
all 3 fonts, but on page 244 (the page that is missing in 4.2BSD and
4.3BSD prints) \fB\(sq\fP (the same character in the same Bold font)
is a filled square - and the fact that the author of the document (bwk)
explicitly called it out indicates that this property of \fB\(sq\fP
existed at the time of writing.

* My hypothesis is that Ossanna's original troff document was troffed
some time around the date of its authorship (1976-10-11), and at that
time the font set on Bell Labs' Graphic Systems typesetter had a hollow
square for \(sq in all 3 fonts.  At some point between 1976-10-11 and
1978-08-04 (authorship date of bwk's troff tutorial document), the
font set on the very same Graphic Systems typesetter was updated to a
newer version that had \(sq as a filled square in Times Bold font -
and bwk's doc specifically shows this character in regular and bold,
when all others were shown only in regular.  Furthermore, the design
of /usr/pub/eqnchar was made at the time of \fB\(sq\fP being a filled
square, as this construct is used for the "blot" made-up character.

* The production of the complete book must have included some clever
touch-up, as far as page headers/footers go.  The document-local page
numbers have been removed, and instead each page has a continuous
(across the book) page number on it.  It would have been impossible to
do a single troff run across all those diverse documents, hence I can
only reason that the addition of those book-wide page numbers (and
removal of original "local" ones) must have been a post-troff touch-up.
Plus the font difference: the newly applied headers/footers with page
numbers and document names are in a sans-serif font clearly different
from the text body.

What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
book?  Comb binding like BSD books?  Or was it just a 3-ring binder
which anyone could open and add/remove pages easily?

This is a part of early UNIX history which I am ignorant about, hence
I would love to be educated.  Was the "original" V7 manual printed
(provided to licensees?) in a form where one could "easily" (without
ripping apart a fully bound book) extract individual pages and reuse
them in a different compilation, like Usenix presumably did for
4.2BSD?  Was the "original" V7 manual available with each document
page bearing only a "local" in-document page number, rather than an
across-the-book one like in Al's version?

M~