Re: [TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

[Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>]

On Jun 25, 2019, at 7:28 PM, Peter Jeremy <peter@rulingia.com> wrote:
> 
> [Resurrecting an old thread to provide some input from Dave Horsfall]
> On 2019-Apr-11 06:52:08 +0200, Fabio Scotoni <fabio@esse.ch> wrote:
>> On 4/11/19 1:19 AM, Bakul Shah wrote:
>>> On Apr 10, 2019, at 3:24 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> [...] is the Lions book including PS and PDF and in the original troff thankfully.
>>> 
>>> May be someone will be inspired enough to convert this to troff?

Er... I wasn't entirely serious but if I were doing this, I'd start
with detexing the source and then manually adding in -ms macros.
The detexed source is about 14 lines and surprisingly readable. Almost.
This should be a piece of cake for one of you nroff wizards!

> ...
>> Thus, the first step would be to reverse engineer the troff macros used
>> to typeset the book.
>> Then the TeX sources would need to be converted to those troff macros;
>> this can possibly be automated entirely.
>> Then the matching version of troff would need to be used to typeset it
>> (likely via apout and V6 or V7 troff).
>> Finally, the C/A/T typesetter output would need to be converted to
>> PostScript or PDF (either Adobe's psroff or Chris Lewis's psroff from
>> comp.unix.sources can likely help with that; I got Lewis's psroff to
>> work a while ago, but it's pretty brittle).
> 
> On 2019-Jun-26 11:34:31 +1000, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>> 'Twas NROFF on the CSU's LA120 (I should know; I ran the Unix section),
>> with draft versions on a Duckwriter which I helped proof-read.  Don't know
>> whether custom macros were used; quite likely, as he was that sort of
>> bloke.  After all, he was a Comp Sci lecturer (one of mine!) and if you
>> find yourself writing the same lines over and over again...
>> 
>> Going by that snippet of the thread (too much to follow, as I'm still
>> figuring out from which lists I've been bounced) it would be a heroic
>> effort to reverse-engineer it, and quite likely not worth the trouble.
>> 
>> The original source would've been at Elec Eng, but long gone by now.
>> 
>> As for TROFF, well, I'm not aware that UNSW has a C/A/T :-)
>> 
>> Oh, the LA120 had a single-use nylon ribbon, I think, not fabric, hence
>> the somewhat high quality (I no longer have my Lions books to check; lost
>> after several house moves).
> 
> -- 
> Peter Jeremy