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From: Edouard Klein <edouardklein@gmail.com>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Bell Foreign-Language UNIX Efforts
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2023 14:38:44 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87ilewhlus.fsf@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Y8sUnihzhzTBOuKMJUnuV0DUZEqHb223xyoxXTmq-eMAe4HFZLgce38hxypW1K9UozOjAJxyXIpwzsWCfnZCRXTXictF--9hPEM__lviJ9A=@protonmail.com>

Hi,

I just got off the phone with my father, who was working at the CII,
then Bull, in the eighties through to the early nineties.

Here is what I learned:
Bull ported UNIX to their own line of Mitra 125:
  - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitra_15
and later to the SPS-9 which is from what I understand a license-built
ridge 32, somewhat comparable to a VAX :
  - https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1984/11/21/bull-va-fabriquer-en-france-un-ordinateur-scientifique-americain_3016844_1819218.html
  - http://www.histoireinform.com/Histoire/+infos2/chr5infa.htm
  - https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/ridge-32-a-bitsliced-early-risc-graphical-workstation/1788

These efforts included first a translation of all the manuals from
english to french. The translated manuals sometimes still wore the AT&T
logo.

The strings associated with error codes, and such were also tranlated in
the source.

This proved insufficient and awkward, and then a real
internationalization effort was spearheaded by Bull.

Anecdote: the abbrevation i18n for "Internationalization" was coined by
Pascal Beyls, his boss at the time.

My father was the representative for Bull at X/Open.
Internationalization was part of the normalization process. I have on my
desk volume 3 of the X/Open portability guide, whose section 3 is
entirely dedicated to internationalization.

The document is dated december 1988 and therefore predates UTF8 (92 if
I'm correct) and even unicode (but I was blowing my first birthday
candle at the time so my memory of the events may be a bit fuzzy).
The document state that 8 bits are enough for western european
languages, and 16 bits should do for asian languages. It promotes the
use of ISO-8859-1.

It notes that UNIX is limited to 7-bit ASCII and is therefore as is
unsuitable for internationalization.

It promotes the LANG and LC_* env variables as an annoucement mechanism, and
gives examples where the locale is set to french.

It also explains the "Message catalogues" with stores "messages [...]
separate from the logic of a program, to be translated into several
languages, and to be retrieved at run-time according to the language
requirements of each user".

If you want to dig into a fun part of foreign UNIX history, my father
mentions that along with the corresponding Bull hardware, UNIX was sold to
the USSR, along with the translated (in russian) manuals. So somewhere
in a gas field in siberia may exist a russian UNIX manual with the BULL
and AT&T logo. They only had the binaries, not the source of the system.

There were a few "homegrown unix-like" efforts in europe, and bull was
part of a few of them.

BULL then moved to Linux, that's another phone call to make.

If you want to dig more into that, the CNAM (a school/museum in Paris,
if you are there, come see the museum it is absolutely awesome) is
documenting early UNIX history and did a conference a few years back
about it. Clem Cole was there and spoke. Here are some links about
their efforts:
-
https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-europe-entre-innovation-diffusion-et-heritage-913008.kjsp
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mCSFSF-i1A  <- begins with Clem's
talk, but the rest is worth watching as well.


Hope that helps,

Cheers,

Edouard.






segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> writes:

> Good evening or whichever time of day you find yourself in. I was reading up on
> Japanese computer history when I got to thinking specifically on where UNIX
> plays in with it all, which then lead to some further curiosity with non-English
> UNIX in general.
>
> In the midst of documentation searches/study, I've spotted French and what I
> believe to be Japanese documentation bearing Bell/AT&T logos. I've also seen a
> few things pop up in German although they looked to be university resources, not
> something from the Bell System. In any case, is there any clear historical
> record on efforts within the USG/USL line, or research for that matter, towards
> the end of foreign language support or perhaps even single polyglot
> installations? Would BSD have been more poised for this sort of thing being more
> widely utilized in the academic scene?
>
> - Matt G.

      parent reply	other threads:[~2023-03-19 14:12 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-03-19  5:00 [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
2023-03-19 13:32 ` [TUHS] " Diomidis Spinellis
2023-03-19 13:47   ` [TUHS] " Ralph Corderoy
2023-03-19 20:27     ` [TUHS] " Rob Pike
2023-03-20  7:55       ` arnold
2023-03-20  9:22         ` Rob Pike
2023-03-20 11:02           ` arnold
2023-03-20 15:44         ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-03-20 22:01           ` John Cowan
2023-03-20 22:28             ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-03-22  2:25       ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-22  2:52         ` Rob Pike
2023-03-22  7:12           ` Mehdi Sadeghi via TUHS
2023-03-22  7:33             ` Rob Pike
2023-03-22  7:40               ` arnold
2023-03-22 10:02                 ` Skip Tavakkolian
2023-03-22 10:09                   ` Skip Tavakkolian
2023-03-22 12:02                     ` Rob Pike
2023-03-22 22:33                       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-03-22 23:33                         ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-03-23  0:01                           ` Warren Toomey via TUHS
2023-03-19 13:38 ` Edouard Klein [this message]

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