Warner,

I should have copies of it, I'm also in email contact with both Tom T. (aka tjt - who is someone I reference often on this list) and Janet (Tom often weekly).

As for history, until Janet created that document for Masscomp, nothing existed other than a short paper I believe Dennis wrote for V6 and updated for V7. Cliff and Tom A had spent hours in Tom and my shared office picking our brains. What they came up with was not quite right (to be polite) and tjt attempted to fix it - which at least was technically correct. Janet has the head of Masscomp's documentation group, re-wrote Tom's version to make it easier to understand. I should have the version in my files [Janet might even have the original troff sources].

When Tim O'Reilly (who had been writing a lot of our doc under contract and started to do the original 'nutshell' series) cut a deal to take the documentation he was writing for us 'out of Masscomp' and publish it (thus creating the original X-Windows documentation and the first real hit for ORA), precedent had been set.

Shortly after, Tom and I had left for Belmont, ney Stellar, and Janet and Tom decided to redo it as a book.

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 9:50 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

Greetings,

I'm trying to find the predecessor to "Writing a UNIX Device Driver, J. Egan & T. Teixeira, 1st ed, 1988". In the preface, it says:

"This book is based on a MASSCOMP manual, Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver. The first version that MASSCOMP published as part of the documentation set for the MC-500 was based on preliminary drafts prepared for MASSCOMP by Cliff Cary and Tom Albough of Creare R&D."

I checked bit keepers and found nothing.

I was wondering if people on this list know of this manual, have a copy, etc. In general, I'm looking for pre-SysV driver manuals. I can find all kinds of SysV driver books (some of which cover 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD as well), but nothing for System III or V7 unix. There were a lot of early systems that were based on ports of V7 to different architectures that were then updated to System III or System V (at least according to the big chart of unix history and some wikipedia entries, which may be just repeating marketing schlock and not reflect actual reality).

As part of a talk I'm putting together on the 40th anniversary of V7, I wanted to have a bit of history for things we still have in unix today (like strategy) and things that successors to unix have added or left behind (like the packet mux in V7 that was tossed aside for either STREAMS or netinet from BSD, though packet muxing to userland is back with DPDK).

Warner