Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Nemo Nusquam <cym224@gmail.com>]

For what it's worth, the OpenSolaris pg.c 
(https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/pg/pg.c) 
contains the following:

/*
  * Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
  * Use is subject to license terms.
  */

/*    Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T    */
/*      All Rights Reserved      */

N.

On 06/14/20 19:37, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> Eric Shienbrood at Berkeley wrote "more" around 1979, and it was the 
> standard BSD pager. It was inspired by the --More-- option in the ITS 
> terminal driver at MIT.
>
> "pg" did not come from Berkeley. My recollection is that it came from 
> AT&T in response to requests to include "more", which was in exptools 
> at Bell Labs but not in any standard AT&T system. "pg" is not in my 
> UNIX 5.0 manual, but it's in my SVID with the comment "New in System V 
> Release 2".
>
> UNIX 5.0 was the AT&T internal pre-release of System V.  SVID was the 
> System V Interface Definition from AT&T.
>
>     Mary Ann
>
> On 6/14/20 3:52 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
>> All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you 
>> have
>> an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?
>>
>> Thanks, Warren
>>
>> ----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net> -----
>>
>> Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
>> From: Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net>
>> To: wkt@tuhs.org
>> Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager
>>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.
>>
>> The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
>> System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
>> historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]
>>
>> I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
>> package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
>> utility.”[2]
>>
>> I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
>> into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
>> the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
>> Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
>> the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
>> available.
>>
>> Any ideas on how to proceed?
>>
>>
>> Best
>> Michael
>>
>>
>> [1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)),
>>      but I've also found other sites stating the same.
>>
>> [2]
>> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-utils/pg.c 
>>
>>
>> [3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----