[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual?

[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,

Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original
printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition?  Does such a thing
exist?  Given that Brian S. Walden produced and published a PDF reprint
of this manual (presumably done with some "modern" version of troff)
back in 1998, I reason that there probably wasn't much interest in
preserving the original print by painstaking scanning (and the files
from such a scan would have been ginormous by 1998 standards), hence I
am not certain if such a scanned version exists - but I thought I
would ask nonetheless.

I was however very pleased to discover that some very kind soul named
Erica Fischer did scan and upload the complete set of Usenix printed
books for 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD - here is the 4.2BSD version:

https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-supplement-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/smm-4.2bsd

and here is 4.3BSD:

https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-sup1-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-sup2-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/smm-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/uum-index-4.3bsd

It is my understanding that all supplementary docs (the papers that
were originally in volumes 2a and 2b in the V7 manual) were retroffed
by UCB/Usenix for 4.3BSD edition, but the earlier 4.2BSD Usenix print
seems to be different - it looks like for 4.2BSD they only did a new
troff run for all man pages and for new (Berkeley-added) supplementary
docs, but in the case of docs which originally appeared in V7 vol 2,
it appears that Usenix did some kind of analogue mass reproduction
from a historical V7 master, *without* doing a new troff run on those
docs.  *If* this hypothesis is correct, then Erica's uploaded scan of
4.2BSD manuals can serve as a practical substitute for the presumably-
missing scan of the original printing of V7 manual - but I would like
to double-check my hypothesis with others who are presumably more
knowledgeable about this ancient history (some of you actually lived
through that history, unlike me!), hence the reason for this post.

I would appreciate either confirmation or correction of the guesses
and conjectures I expressed above.

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Friday, January 5th, 2024 at 2:17 PM, Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org> wrote:


> Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,
>
> Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original
> printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition? Does such a thing
> exist?
>
> M~

I'm not aware of any existing scans. I do, however, have on hand for about one more day a nearly original V7 manual set, both volumes, that I'm fairly certain were used with 4.1BSD, as they also include Vol 2C (albeit the rest of Vol 2 is one volume, no actual 2A 2B split, dunno how that plays in.)  Additionally, the Volume 1 has some changes, mostly additions like the RAND editor, I'm pretty sure od(1) was the only base page replaced.  I mention I have access to this for a day because I'm quite tardy on mailing these to Jacob Ritorto, another list member, and I don't want to keep kicking the can down the road, already delayed a few times.

In any case, there's a second Volume 2 binder, also V7, that I donated to the bookshelf in the compsci lounge of the local university, I can always go check that back out and take any scans that would help.  Would just be Volume 2 stuff but that represents much more typographical variety.

I additionally have an almost complete Usenix 4.2BSD set, just missing the Programmer's Reference Guide, so if you're interested in any visual inspections between the two, happy to sit down at my desk with the magnifying glass tonight and see if I can help out with what you're working on.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Will Senn]

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I have a set... 2 volumes - they look like phone books. Dunno if it’s “original” printing, but it seems like it’s got v7 only stuff.

Bought it on amazon, used, several years back. If anyone’s gung ho about scanning them, I’d be up for contributing them (with the expectation of getting the scans).

Will


Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 5, 2024, at 5:19 PM, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Friday, January 5th, 2024 at 2:17 PM, Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,
>> 
>> Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original
>> printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition? Does such a thing
>> exist?
>> 
>> M~
> 
> I'm not aware of any existing scans. I do, however, have on hand for about one more day a nearly original V7 manual set, both volumes, that I'm fairly certain were used with 4.1BSD, as they also include Vol 2C (albeit the rest of Vol 2 is one volume, no actual 2A 2B split, dunno how that plays in.)  Additionally, the Volume 1 has some changes, mostly additions like the RAND editor, I'm pretty sure od(1) was the only base page replaced.  I mention I have access to this for a day because I'm quite tardy on mailing these to Jacob Ritorto, another list member, and I don't want to keep kicking the can down the road, already delayed a few times.
> 
> In any case, there's a second Volume 2 binder, also V7, that I donated to the bookshelf in the compsci lounge of the local university, I can always go check that back out and take any scans that would help.  Would just be Volume 2 stuff but that represents much more typographical variety.
> 
> I additionally have an almost complete Usenix 4.2BSD set, just missing the Programmer's Reference Guide, so if you're interested in any visual inspections between the two, happy to sit down at my desk with the magnifying glass tonight and see if I can help out with what you're working on.
> 
> - Matt G.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 5, 2024, at 5:19 PM, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> On Friday, January 5th, 2024 at 2:17 PM, Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,
>> 
>> Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original
>> printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition? Does such a thing
>> exist?
>> 
>> M~
> 
> I'm not aware of any existing scans. I do, however, have on hand for about one more day a nearly original V7 manual set, both volumes, that I'm fairly certain were used with 4.1BSD, as they also include Vol 2C (albeit the rest of Vol 2 is one volume, no actual 2A 2B split, dunno how that plays in.)  Additionally, the Volume 1 has some changes, mostly additions like the RAND editor, I'm pretty sure od(1) was the only base page replaced.  I mention I have access to this for a day because I'm quite tardy on mailing these to Jacob Ritorto, another list member, and I don't want to keep kicking the can down the road, already delayed a few times.
> 
> In any case, there's a second Volume 2 binder, also V7, that I donated to the bookshelf in the compsci lounge of the local university, I can always go check that back out and take any scans that would help.  Would just be Volume 2 stuff but that represents much more typographical variety.
> 
> I additionally have an almost complete Usenix 4.2BSD set, just missing the Programmer's Reference Guide, so if you're interested in any visual inspections between the two, happy to sit down at my desk with the magnifying glass tonight and see if I can help out with what you're working on.
> 
> - Matt G.

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Matt,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my odd inquiry!

> In any case, there's a second Volume 2 binder, also V7 [...]
> Would just be Volume 2 stuff but that represents much more typographical
> variety.
>
> I additionally have an almost complete Usenix 4.2BSD set, just missing the
> Programmer's Reference Guide, so if you're interested in any visual
> inspections between the two, happy to sit down at my desk with the magnifying
> glass tonight and see if I can help out with what you're working on.

The main thing I am looking for is either confirmation or refutation
of my hypothesis that those Vol2 docs that aren't Berkeley-new have
remained entirely unchanged (and *not* retroffed) between V7 and 4.2BSD
Usenix print.  Perhaps flip through a few randomly selected docs and
see if all page breaks line up exactly or not - when UCB/Usenix
retroffed these docs for 4.3BSD, they used a newer typesetter (APS-5)
driven by a slightly newer troff (early ditroff), and the font metrics
are different enough to displace line breaks and page breaks throughout
the corpus of the text.

Also if you have time, here are some specific spots in V7 Vol2 which I
would appreciate getting looked at:

* Vol 2a doc 8, "Typing Documents on the UNIX System", M. E. Lesk: the
last page of this paper exhibits a "Figure 1" drawing that appears to
have been done literally by hand, with someone taking a pen (or pencil
or whatever other handwriting implement) to the output of the typesetter
(was it photographic paper that had to be developed first?) and drawing
the figure, before the resulting master was then used for mass
reproduction.  In Erica's scan of 4.2BSD UNIX User's Manual Supplementary
docs book, this hand drawing appears on page 346.  Does it look exactly
the same in V7 original?

* Vol 2a doc 12, "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual", J. F. Ossanna - please
look at the following details:

- in Table I (Font Style Examples), is the square character hollow in
all 3 fonts (like in 4.2BSD print), or is it filled in bold or in any
other font?

- the two pointing hand characters in Special Mathematical Font, do
they look exactly the same between V7 and 4.2BSD?

- if you spot any other diffs, please let me know!

* Vol 2a doc 13, "A TROFF Tutorial", B. W. Kernighan: is there a final
page titled "Appendix A: Phototypesetter Character Set", or is it
missing?  This page comes from ttcharset troff source file, it is
included in Brian S. Walden's 1998 PDF reprint, but it is missing in
both 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD prints from Usenix.

- If this Appendix A page is included, how does \(sq look?  Is it
hollow in the main table but filled in bold, or is hollow in both
places?  (Or something else?)

* Vol 2a doc 16, "Make - A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs",
S. I. Feldman: first of all, do page breaks line up perfectly between
V7 and 4.2BSD prints?  If they do, please look at the top of page
labeled "- 6 -": there is a drawing that was apparently done by hand,
similarly to the one in the -ms document, although this one is a bit
simpler.  Does it look like the drawing in 4.2BSD version is exactly
the same as in V7?

* Vol 2b doc 31, "UNIX Implementation", K. Thompson: does it look
exactly the same between V7 and 4.2BSD?  Do all page breaks line up?
There is Fig 1 on page 2 and Fig 2 on page 8 - do they look the same
between the two prints?  Once again, it is a mystery to me how these
two figures were produced originally: pic didn't exist yet, and the
troff source only leaves blank space for each figure.  But they don't
look hand-drawn either - so how were they made...

Finally, in Volume 1 - how does eqnchar(7) page look in the original
V7 version?  The version in 4.2BSD print was clearly retroffed anew,
as the date in the footer is 1983 - so I wonder how the original V7
version looked.  Is the "blot" character a black filled square, or is
it something else?  Are "square" and "circle" just above it both
hollow?

TIA for all this scrutiny,
Your resident troff nut Mychaela

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[segaloco via TUHS]

Alright here's some commentary on and pictures of key pieces (I'll make reference to USG/PWB stuff in here too, but don't have pictures, 4.0 and 5.0/System V docs are scanned, variations on System III docs as well, can point those out to you if needed):

> * Vol 2a doc 8, "Typing Documents on the UNIX System", M. E. Lesk: the
> last page of this paper exhibits a "Figure 1" drawing that appears to
> have been done literally by hand ...
> ... this hand drawing appears on page 346. Does it look exactly
> the same in V7 original?

https://i.imgur.com/CiUz01n.jpg - V7 left, 4.2BSD right
https://i.imgur.com/i8uxEbv.jpg - V7 revised left, V7 right

The V7 and 4.2BSD pages are closer than the V7 and V7 HRW Revised edition.  Most noticeably there is some schmutz there around RP that is in both V7 and 4.2BSD, but not the HRW version.

This paper is not in the USG/PWB 3.0 and onward stuff, MM is fully entrenched as the standard macro package in that lineage.  There is a Typing Documents with MM but this is a little foldout reference card.

> * Vol 2a doc 12, "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual", J. F. Ossanna - please
> look at the following details:
> 
> - in Table I (Font Style Examples), is the square character hollow in
> all 3 fonts (like in 4.2BSD print), or is it filled in bold or in any
> other font?
> 
> - the two pointing hand characters in Special Mathematical Font, do
> they look exactly the same between V7 and 4.2BSD?

https://i.imgur.com/k3OflK4.jpg - 4.2BSD left, V7 right
https://i.imgur.com/ZBPj8kK.jpg - V7 left, V7 revised right

Nothing really jumps out at me as significantly different.  The smaller pressing on the Usenix stuff makes some of the busier characters (e.g. copyright) look pretty filled in, but this may not represent a difference in exposures of original plates.  The pointing characters are likely the same, but the smaller pressing makes it quite difficult to see the cuffs clearly, in my physical copy of 4.2BSD it's barely intelligible that there's a cuff on the left hand.

For the record, the System III's Table 1 looks pretty shoddy, like a several generations removed photocopy of the V7 version.  Release 4.0's table I think reflects Bell's shift into ditroff territory, as it has wholly new fonts, and now the Special Mathematical Font is noted as prepared by Wang Laboratories, Inc. rather than Graphic Systems, Inc., reflecting the purchase of GSI by Wang.  The System V document drops this font table entirely.

> * Vol 2a doc 13, "A TROFF Tutorial", B. W. Kernighan: is there a final
> page titled "Appendix A: Phototypesetter Character Set" ... missing in
> both 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD prints from Usenix.
> 
> - If this Appendix A page is included, how does \(sq look? Is it
> hollow in the main table but filled in bold, or is hollow in both
> places? (Or something else?)

https://i.imgur.com/cDpAXTS.jpg - V7 single shot
https://i.imgur.com/iHKuuYE.jpg - V7 left, V7 revised right

Bold square is filled, regular is hollow in both printings.  Nothing I can spot that really tells them apart.

The story is the the same with System III, just a kinda fuzzier later generation from the same plate.  Gotta remind myself anything being distributed in earnest as "System III" is a few years down the line from V7, probably not worth it to try and go find the plates and make really clean copies again.  The page in Release 4.0 is revamped, and also reflects the new font, along with additional characters and details, although the square fill/no-fill is the same.  I can't find a section of the System V Document Processing Guide that resembles A TROFF Tutorial, that specific paper may not be represented in documentation after 4.0.

> * Vol 2a doc 16, "Make - A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs",
> S. I. Feldman: first of all, do page breaks line up perfectly between
> V7 and 4.2BSD prints? If they do, please look at the top of page
> labeled "- 6 -": there is a drawing that was apparently done by hand,
> similarly to the one in the -ms document, although this one is a bit
> simpler. Does it look like the drawing in 4.2BSD version is exactly
> the same as in V7?

https://i.imgur.com/ZihxD0P.jpg - V7 left, 4.2BSD right

Nothing noticeably different, same is true with V7 revised, didn't bother to take a picture.

Same in System III.  Release 4.0 once again is changed with the new typesetter.  This changes yet again in System V.  Here's a picture since this is the one of that lot not scanned yet: https://i.imgur.com/C0Hm9DO.jpeg

> * Vol 2b doc 31, "UNIX Implementation", K. Thompson: does it look
> exactly the same between V7 and 4.2BSD? Do all page breaks line up?
> There is Fig 1 on page 2 and Fig 2 on page 8 - do they look the same
> between the two prints?

https://i.imgur.com/fpYnC0S.jpg - Fig. 1, V7 left, 4.2BSD right
https://i.imgur.com/KfZbhSB.jpg - Fig. 2, Same Arrangement

No noticeable difference, same is true of the HRW volumes.

I only have System III Volume 2A, this is a 2B paper so can't vouch for it, although there's a Plexus System III Volume 2B on bitsavers that I believe contains papers that are also BTL typesetting exposures, just packed in with some fluff from Plexus.  These diagrams do appear to be revamped for Release 4.0, and like A TROFF Tutorial I don't think there's a variation on this paper included with the System V set.  It's a bit complicated with those since they in some cases broke down the barriers between different documents, merged them together, dropped some pieces, added some others...etc, the transformation from Release 4.0 to System V pretty much brought an end to the conventional papers format and ushered in the style of the commercial era literature.

> Finally, in Volume 1 - how does eqnchar(7) page look in the original
> V7 version? The version in 4.2BSD print was clearly retroffed anew,
> as the date in the footer is 1983 - so I wonder how the original V7
> version looked. Is the "blot" character a black filled square, or is
> it something else? Are "square" and "circle" just above it both
> hollow?

https://i.imgur.com/bpolKEF.jpg - 4.2BSD left, V7 right
https://i.imgur.com/QmaqCe0.jpg - V7 left, V7 HRW right

The V7 and 4.2BSD material appears to originate from the same plate, although the V7 and V7 revised are noticeably different.  For instance, note the change in size of the blot square.

Goodness gracious did the situation lead to a little rabbit hole with the USG/PWB line:

https://i.imgur.com/NH4hk8c.jpeg - 3.0 left, 4.1 middle, 5.0 right
https://i.imgur.com/xVQVOMu.jpeg - System V (DEC, 3B20) left, System V (3B5) middle, SVR2 (HRW) right

So Release 3.0 looks a lot like the original V7 stuff, but then into 4.1 and 5.0, instead you see the larger blot symbol and addition of scrL, among other differences.  However, both System V documents, while having for instance the addition of scrL, *also* have the smaller blot symbol that hasn't been in this documentation line since probably 3.0.  This isn't the only thing like this, for instance the System V variants refer to a "UNIX (System) User Guide" but then the Release (i.e. internal) stuff has "UNIX (System) User's Guide".  There are other such very, very minor discrepancies between the USG internal releases and the published System V stuff, almost as if they technically split earlier and were just cross-pollinating since, but what strikes me as odd is 4.1 does get the updated blot character, so System V not having it was either a regression in the document typesetting *or* evidence that whatever became the System V eqnchar(5) page shares a separate branch point from 3.0 than that seen in 4.1 and 5.0.  Speculation though, can't say for sure, it's just...odd...

Finally, you'll note that the page in the HRW book is goofed, none of the characters are actually there, just a copy of the string invoking them.  Whoops, it happens.

> 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?

Here are some angled shots of some of these books, some of the stuff scans and cover pictures don't really catch:

https://i.imgur.com/tQ7wP80.jpeg - V7 HRW
https://i.imgur.com/plKh9Ji.jpeg - 4.2BSD Usenix (Not first editions, those apparently had white combs?)
https://i.imgur.com/0ONBep9.jpeg - System III Volume 2A and Release 4.0 Starter Packages
https://i.imgur.com/hM7F0R4.jpeg - System V various bindings

Anything research V7 and back was largely just papers in ringed binders or report covers.  I've seen some pictures of literature in Bell Labs report covers  of similar motif to the Release 3.0 manual cover (Saul Bass logo, blue/yellow stripe) with a window to see the titlepage through.  Dunno if that was something commonly done or just someone's copy for their desk they put together with available covers.  V8 was a comb bound manual, V9 appears to be a hard cover (Doug M. sent me a cover scan for the wiki), and external V10 at least were perfect bound.

BSD documentation was largely similar to research documentation until the Usenix run.  There were a limited number of 4.1BSD documents printed on both blank-covered and Bell Labs-covered comb-bound media for a particular Bell Labs group, these also include the Marx supplement.  Other folks here can probably tell you oodles more about that stuff.  4.2 is then the start of the Usenix manuals, although it is also quite common for loose/binder distribution at this time as well, same for 4.3BSD.  That compsci lounge bookshelf has a few 4.3BSD binders that look old enough, they've got that V7 volume 2 keeping them company now.  Finally, 4.4BSD documents were perfect bound by O'Reilly.

I believe at least some USG Program Generic documentation was comb bound in the 70s.  The only specimen I know of is a document describing the kernel routines in Program Generic II.  Available CB-UNIX documentation appears to be papers in binders.  Early PWB I'm fairly certain was also distributed like this, although I have some curiosity if the publication quality improved somewhat with PWB 2.0 as there is a quite nice bibliography document from around that time with a nicely made cover in maroon with the Saul Bass logo among other things.  If a bibliography got such nice treatment, maybe the manuals handed out to employees did as well, but I wasn't there.

PWB 3.0, which drops the PWB to become Release 3.0, is then when comb bound is the norm for manuals from USG.  However, at this time the supplementary papers are still typically just loose pages in a report cover or binder.  As seen above, when WECo goes to distribute this commercially, the secondary volumes were bound in report covers.  The large Release 4.0 documentation set was similarly two volumes of papers, but Bell Labs also cut a smaller subset of the documents in the form of two "Starter Packages" geared towards programmers and typists respectively.  These as you can see are the large form but comb bound, something I don't think I've seen with other Bell System UNIX stuff.  I quite like this format, if I had to travel with these documents this format is what I'd pack in my luggage.

Getting on to Release 5.0 and System V, these also featured comb-bound manuals, although the supporting literature was distributed in a few different formats.  From the picture above you can see that they shipped binders, perfect bound books (with 7 holes punched in them Bell style), and papers in report covers.  Of all the materials, the papers in the report covers look the most "TROFF-ish", the rest are very BSP-ish.  For the 3B5 release of System V, WECo opted towards small three ring binders instead, a trend that would continue into SVR2.  Internal to Bell Labs, their expanded manual was also a comb-bound issue for System V, just with a different cover, but the BTL issue of SVR2 features a completely different binder, down to the rings, plastic, etc. not even sourced from the same kind as the ones out in the world.  Still it was a binder, something that would continue with the red SVR2 and SVR3 binders distributed with ATTIS products.

Finally, Bell has some other perfect bound stuff in that the revised V7 manual discussed here is of course bound this way (also with the punched holes, only three of them though) as well as the HRW 5 volume SVR2 set (the one with the metalic alphabet block cover.)  There are then SVR3 and SVR4 perfect bound manuals, the former being generally grey with a colorful globe picture bearing "UNIX" in the middle with lines going all over the globe from it, while the latter start off as a series of blue books with a globe and big gold "V" and UNIX superimposed on it.  Later SVR4 stuff transitioned to a series of solid color covers and then on to white covers with some small landscape picture (SVR4.2 era pretty sure.)  There are other odds and ends but that covers a good chunk of what I'm aware of.

> TIA for all this scrutiny,
> Your resident troff nut Mychaela

Oh I think we've got a few of those :)

By the way, this is lots of stuff, thanks for bearing with me, I saw this as an opportunity to attempt to summarize much of what I've learned the past few years about how all of this documentation was produced and presented.  That said, I may have parts of the story inaccurate as again, I wasn't there, so apologies for any misrepresentations and corrections to the record are welcome and encouraged!

Finally, just because it's worth pointing out, here's comparisons of the binder V7 set covers vs published V7 set covers:

Vol 1: https://i.imgur.com/kJ3LcjH.jpg
Vol 2: https://i.imgur.com/rdjnrkP.jpg

Whew.  I'm tapped out.  If you have any further questions I'll probably chit chat 1 on 1 but figured it might be good to tie all these threads together in a message on list, especially so I can be corrected, I'm a secondary source after all.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Matt,

> Whew.  I'm tapped out.

Thank you very much for this very awesome work you just did!

> Goodness gracious did the situation lead to a little rabbit hole
> with the USG/PWB line:

Someone else (whoever is more interested in this line) will have to
thank you for this portion of the work, but the parts I am happiest
for are these:

> The V7 and 4.2BSD pages are closer than the V7 and V7 HRW Revised edition.
> [...]
> The V7 and 4.2BSD material appears to originate from the same plate,
> although the V7 and V7 revised are noticeably different.  For instance,
> note the change in size of the blot square.

Thank you for confirming all of my hypotheses here!  Thus it appears
that:

1) 1983 HRW version of V7 manual is not "the real thing", instead that
   Holy Original status belongs to the ringed binder version;

2) All non-Berkeley supplementary docs in 4.2BSD Usenix print are from
   the same plates as Holy Original V7 docs, thus the scans uploaded
   to archive.org by Ms. Erica Fischer can serve as a perfect reference
   for exactly how those Holy Original docs looked, for those of us
   who don't have a physical copy of that Holy Original to look at.

Once again, thank you very much for this very awesome work!

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Will Senn]

On 1/5/24 23:08, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> Alright here's some commentary on and pictures of key pieces (I'll make reference to USG/PWB stuff in here too, but don't have pictures, 4.0 and 5.0/System V docs are scanned, variations on System III docs as well, can point those out to you if needed):
>
>
> Whew.  I'm tapped out.  If you have any further questions I'll probably chit chat 1 on 1 but figured it might be good to tie all these threads together in a message on list, especially so I can be corrected, I'm a secondary source after all.
>
> - Matt G.
No wonder, you're tapped out. Great job pulling this together. Finally, 
I'm catching up with this awesome thread. Does the original have an LD 
page? and, surely I missed this, but are you or have you scanned it for 
posterity... and interested parties :)?

Will

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Al Kossow]

On 1/5/24 2:17 PM, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,
>
> Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original
> printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition?  Does such a thing
> exist? 

I have volume 2 of the published version 0-03-061742-1 and  0-03-061742-x on bitsavers
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition
Earlier internal versions exist.

Volume 1 appears to be well over $100 now on the used book market.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Friday, January 5th, 2024 at 5:06 PM, Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:
> 
> Volume 1 appears to be well over $100 now on the used book market.

First Al welcome back, sorry I'm an idiot that caused some animosity in the past, we're working towards the same goal and I'm glad to see your name around here again.

Second, I've got paper copies of both HRW volumes, I would more than happily cover shipping both ways if you'd be interested in the Volume 1 to add with this.  Your scan facilities are much more sophisticated than mine.  My only condition is a non-destructive scan, I would want it back afterwards.  Otherwise if there's interest I can add it to my own backlog just remember I'm scanning on a crappy little Canon LiDE scanner from Goodwill.  It's all I've got, not humming and hawing around until I get the perfect setup to take care of business.

Anywho, Mychaela thanks for the thorough inquiry, I'm glad you've thought out what it is you're seeking already, makes it much easier to pipeline it.  While I'm at it I'll also satisfy my own curiosity and note whether the discrepancies you're noting are also apparent in some way in Release 3.0 and 4.0 print materials vs Version 7.  AFAIK pretty much everything had been remastered by the time System V rolled around, I'm fairly certain the osdd macro package was used for those, my understanding of osdd macros were that they were used for producing more "BSP-ish" typesetting of papers, what with a select code, issue number, and date in the upper right, fonts that align with BSPs, etc.  Release 4.0 is the last one in the USG/PWB line, to my understanding, liable to have pages in the print documents taken from the same plates that go back to V7 (except for the AT&T branded Release 4.0-ish "Starter Packages", still haven't found these in the wild.)

More to come!

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[amp1ron]

I have a copy of the HRW version of the Unix Programmer's Manual "Revised and Expanded Edition" for the 7th edition.  Copyright 1983, 1979 Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated.  Perfect bound and 3-hole drilled.  It's complete and in almost new condition.  No markings at all except for a stamped price ($35.45) on the first inside cover page which is not numbered but is page Roman numeral i.

Thankfully I picked it up cheap a few years ago.  I only bought it because I could only find Al's bitsavers volume 2 scan online (plus copies of that scan at various other places) and I also wanted volume 1.

I'll be glad to send it to Al for scanning.  No conditions.  Cutting off the spine for scanning is OK with me.  And I don't need it sent back to me after scanning.  If there's a good scan of it available to me, I'd rather have that than a physical copy that I probably won't be able to find when I need it -- but I've got it on my desk right now.

If Al wants this, he can just let me know what address to ship it to.

-- Ron Pool

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

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~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-01-05T19:02:48-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> * 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.

My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications
colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq
special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by
Bell Labs, but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5.

I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page, so
if it is incorrect, for could be made more precise, I would appreciate
finding out.

Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that
the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition
Programmer's Manual also featured an additional article on bibliography
preparation.  (The original white paper on "refer" was pretty rough
going for a normal user, and primarily concerned with hash map
implementation performance.  Bill Tuthill's paper in BSD is much more
tractable.)

> What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
> book?

The HRW copies I have are perfect bound.  But I can't remember if they
were 3-hole punched as well.

Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of
the V7 Volume 2 manual?  I have wondered about this for years.  In part
to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the
original, it is not perfect, and this has led to some arguments on the
groff mailing list with people who impute excessive authority to it.

(I guess they couldn't see the little hollow gray boxes where the
PostScript renderer had no defined character, if we're talking about the
same document.)

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Jonathan Gray]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 09:22:36PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of
> the V7 Volume 2 manual?  I have wondered about this for years.  In part
> to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the
> original, it is not perfect, and this has led to some arguments on the
> groff mailing list with people who impute excessive authority to it.
> 
> (I guess they couldn't see the little hollow gray boxes where the
> PostScript renderer had no defined character, if we're talking about the
> same document.)

Brian Walden's notes on creating them:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080217213120/http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/bswv7.html
http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/

CreationDate in the pdfs is 1998

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

G. Branden Robinson wrote:

> My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications
> colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq
> special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by
> Bell Labs,

I disagree.  While the "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual" document proves
that \(sq was hollow in all 3 fonts _as of 1976-10-11_ (the original
date of this doc), bwk's document from 1978-08-04 indicates that this
char had to have changed to a filled square by this date.  However,
troff in 1978 was still completely, utterly incapable of driving
anything other than a C/A/T!  Now bwk, the author of this doc, is the
very same fine gentleman who wrote ditroff, the creature that was
finally capable of driving a Linotron 202 or Autologic APS-5 or
whatever - but the timeline does not match up.  BWK's troff tutorial
is dated 1978-08-04, but his work on ditroff (as I understand it)
happened some time around 1980 or 1981.  He may have started ditroff
work in 1979, but definitely not in 1978.

> but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5.

4.3BSD Usenix books prove otherwise: these must have been troffed on
APS-5, as many notes from that time attest, but they feature hollow
square in bold.  Even eqnchar(7) is "wrong" in 4.3BSD print in that
"blot" is a hollow square, clearly counter to original intent of that
named eqn character.

> I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page,

Ahh, so you are involved with groff - got it.  I wrote my own version
of troff (based on V7, running under 4.3BSD and directly emitting
DSC-conforming PostScript) in 3 "bursts" of work around 2004, 2010 and
2012, but I never got around to releasing it.  I am now in the process
of cleaning it up for release, hoping to finally have it out in another
week or two.  And I put a _lot_ of work into replicating the original
troff character set...

> Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that
> the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition

Thank you for clarifying what HRW is - so this 1983 version of 7th ed
UPM is *not* the original?

> > What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
> > book?
>
> The HRW copies I have are perfect bound.  But I can't remember if they
> were 3-hole punched as well.

Thank you for the clarification!  But if HRW version is not the
original, then what was the original like?

> Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of
> the V7 Volume 2 manual?

https://plan9.io/7thEdMan/bswv7.html
http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/

The second page includes a link to this tarball:

http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/v7add.tar.gz

Dates inside that tarball are 1998-12-13.  There was also a place
where Brian missed the retroffing date - see page 287 of his
v7vol2a.pdf.

> I have wondered about this for years.  In part
> to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the
> original, it is not perfect,

What _I_ don't like about BSW's PDF rendition of V7 manuals is that it
is a sort of "closed source" product: there is no published source
package that retraces every step in the flow from ancient troff sources
to the finished product.

In the same 3 "bursts" of activity (2004, 2010 and 2012) when I worked
on my own version of troff, I also worked toward doing a PostScript
reprint of 4.3BSD Usenix books.  4.3BSD happens to be my personally
preferred version of UNIX, but the same methods I use for 4.3BSD books
can also be applied to V7.  I am hoping that in the next week or two I
will find time to release not only my version of troff, but also the
partial set of 4.3BSD books I got done so far.

Out of the 7 books that comprise 4.3BSD Usenix set, the breakdown is
as follows:

* URM, PRM and USD: I got these done already, only need to write new
colophons to be added to the end of each book.  These are the ones I
am hoping to put out Real Soon Now.

* PS1, PS2 and SMM remain to be worked on, but are part of my more
distant plans.

* The "Master Index" volume, I plan to skip that one - too difficult,
and non-essential in my view.

And yes, I am much more "perfectionist" about replicating troff details
than BSW was for his V7 PDF version.

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Clem Cole]

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Hmmm.. I was thinking of keeping out of this food fight, but a couple of
comments concern me a little as they seem to differ from the history as I
recall it.

@Branden, your observation of the font differences is exactly what I
remember between the C/A/T-4 and the APS-5. I never used the
Merganthaler, so I can not comment.

Anyway -- here is what I remember from those days.

On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 11:07 PM Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
wrote:

> However, troff in 1978 was still completely, utterly incapable of driving
> anything other than a C/A/T!

For the original two versions of troff, that is a true statement, but I
suspect that you might be in error; for those of us who lived in the era, I
remember the details of the details differently, and the 3rd version was
available in that timeframe.

@Jon S - please feel free to chime in/update/correct my memory -- you lived
this period as an Explorer Scout

> Now bwk, the author of this doc, is the very same fine gentleman who
> wrote ditroff, the creature that was
> finally capable of driving a Linotron 202 or Autologic APS-5 or whatever

This is true - although I believe that the processor was from Autologic,
the typesetter was from Alphanumeric Corp.



> - but the timeline does not match up.

Hmmm - I think that they do.



> BWK's troff tutorial is dated 1978-08-04,

That sounds about right and would have been when a lot of this topic was
starting to be discussed.



> but his work on ditroff (as I understand it)
> happened some time around 1980 or 1981.

Brian worked on the second edition of ditroff in the early 1980s [which is
in the AT&T Tool Chest], but an earlier version was released on its own
(well bundled with a new C compiler - but as a separate "product" (sort
of), you could get Al Arm's folks - *i.e.*, the Tool Chest does not yet
exist),  Note that this version spurred the name of the new C compiler for
the 1978 version of the K&R (which I thought was set on the APS-5 for the
first version - although it may have been on the Meganthaler).    While I
still have a first edition, at one time, I had a copy of the proofs, which
I got from tjk in late 1977 IIRC - it might have been the Fall of '78
[sadly, I think those pages were lost in the flood of a few years ago, as I
have not seen then in my files].

  He may have started ditroff work in 1979, but definitely not in 1978.
>
Well, the ideas for ditroff started before Joe died ('76/'77 timeframe),
although Brian probably did not really start *direct work* in it until '78
-- taking over for Joe; he was there initially.

Ok, so here goes how to date things in my mind... [note: a few internet
searches should validate some/most/if not all of these dates]

   - Joe Ossana wrote the original troff in PDP-11 assembler in the early
   1970s ['73, I think]
   - He rewrote it around '75 in C - both versions target the Singer GSI
   C/A/T (Computer Assisted Typesetter) - C/A/T-4 typesetter (FWIW: Wang
   bought the rights to GSI later, but that's not relevant to the story.
   [Those that remember the C/A/T, it worked but had several interesting
   issues, and it was expensive to operate].
   - Alphanumeric Corp released the Alphanumeric Photocomposition System
   (APS) #5 in 1976 using an Autologic-73 mini to drive it.
   - AT&T (Computing Facilities/Documentation center folks) decided to buy
   one or more APS-5, although Research went for a Morganthaler to replace the
   GSI unit (there is a wonderful article about Ken and Co - hacking the
   Morganthaler -- I think we have it on TUHS -- I know I have a copy
   somewhere).
   - Discussions about making troff more independent of the output device
   began, and Brian was certainly part of that.
      - Remember, compiler people in those days had started to go to the
      idea of an ISA intermediate language and make the ISA-specific
"back-end" a
      separate thing.  So, the idea of a typesetter independent "IL" and the
      target program followed and certainly was part of that discussion.
   - Ossana died of a heart attack (in the hospital where he was recovering
   from an earlier one, IIRC) on 28-Nov-77.
   - Note: Research is running the Sixth Edition at this point.
   - Through the Sixth Edition, most C programs did I/O themselves via
   read/write (like the C troff had), although Mike Lesk's Portable C Library
   had started to be available ?? with V5 IIRC ?? But it was distributed with
   V6 (see the V6 doc directory for iolib), and a few people (I knew in those
   days) seemed to be actively using it.  Plus, iolib has some interesting
   schemes, like using "-1" as the first parameter to printf(3) or scanf(3) to
   say things were "special." [I'll let the reader go find a copy - it's a fun
   read. I remember using iolib when I first learned C back in the day].
   - Brian has already been developing the new device-independent version
   of troff to target the C/A/T-4, Linotron 202 (Meganthaler), and APS-5 (I'm
   not sure if the latter two had been delivered when he started, but they
   were on the horizon and POR as it were, so the need to support them by then
   was real].
   - During his development of the new system, Brian wanted some changes to
   C itself to make writing this system easier, but most importantly, he
   pushed Dennis for some standardization for the I/O.
   - So Dennis updates C, including his new libS.a - which is the new
   Standard I/O  library - *a.k.a.* <stdio.h>.
   - Brian is now the Editor/Convener of the new CS Book Series for PH
   [which would eventually push out a lot of titles many of us have at least
   read if not in our collection -- I would become a reviewer for a number of
   them].
   - Also, Dennis and Brian started to write what would become K&R, which
   is the dialectic of the language the book describes.
   - V7 is still about a year in the future.
   - Troff had leaked at our labs in the Universities, and some of us had
   it in source, but most everyone at least had the original binary.  In fact,
   the University of Toronto would write their version of that [which is
   related to Tom Ferrin's from UCSF - which is where I got it, but Rob has
   made me think Tom started with UT's version.
   - Many of us wanted it formally and were pushing Al Arms in
   AT&T's Patent and Licensing office to get a distribution of it (pre-Judge
   Green, so what we can get and what cannot is often a little dicey).    This
   would be released in late '78, requiring Dennis' new C compiler with the
   libS.a to compile.
   - K&R was about to be published, so Dennis knew that we needed a way to
   seed and "update" the community.
   - The result was the original release, which included a new C compiler
   (which cost extra money) -- but that is why many of us refer to this flavor
   of C as 'Typesetter C."
   - The V7 Ritchie C compiler would be a slightly improved version of the
   one in the typesetter release.

Anyway - the point is (I believe that) the second release of ditroff
(ditroff2, if you will) is what you are referring to as the later 1980s
version.  This was primarily available via the Tool Chest -- *i.e*., is
post Judge Green.

ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Rich Salz]

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Also https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html has some papers with
Brian as co-author that talk about the history or the 202 and the
background work (troff->ditroff) involved.

I am sure these have been posted here before.

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Clem Cole]

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Rich - thanks, that's the paper I referred to. Note date -- 6-Jan-80 - the
work being done in the summer of '79.  A number of us had been using
ditroff as it had existed for a couple of years by that time, and as the
abstract says - they got the Mergenthaler in the Summer of '79.  What I did
not remember was when the Mergenthaler work started.  I did remember that
it was after the APS-5 had been available for a while.

Just for completeness, Judge Green mandated the breakup of the Bell System
on January 8, 1982 -- Tool Chest *et al*. is set up later  --  all part of
the ability for AT&T to be in the commercial computer business.

ᐧ
ᐧ

On Sat, Jan 6, 2024 at 4:05 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

> Also https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html has some papers
> with Brian as co-author that talk about the history or the 202 and the
> background work (troff->ditroff) involved.
>
> I am sure these have been posted here before.
>

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Michael Parson]

On 2024-01-06 15:04, Rich Salz wrote:
> Also https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html has some papers 
> with
> Brian as co-author that talk about the history or the 202 and the
> background work (troff->ditroff) involved.
> 
> I am sure these have been posted here before.

The <C>omputerphile Youtube channel did a video about 10 years ago about
"The Great 202 jailbreak:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w

A few years ago, a friend of mine gifted me a copy of the book they were
working on that lead to that hack, _The Sicilian Defence_, for which Ken
Thompson designed what is considered to be the first chess font.  I'm 
not
a big chess player, but it is still a neat piece of history.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Al Kossow]

 >>> On 1/6/24 6:42 AM, amp1ron@gmail.com wrote:
 >>>> I have a copy of the HRW version of the Unix Programmer's Manual
 >> "Revised and Expanded Edition" for the 7th edition.  Copyright 1983, 1979
 >
 >>>> I'll be glad to send it to Al for scanning.

PDF of the scan is on bitsavers now next to Volume 2

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Clem,

> Hmmm.. I was thinking of keeping out of this food fight, but a couple of
> comments concern me a little as they seem to differ from the history as I
> recall it.

Thank you for various juicy details - but I still have a hard time
accepting your timeline.  BWK's paper "A Typesetter-independent TROFF"
(troff source here, file date 30-Mar-1983:
http://medialab.freaknet.org/martin/tape/stuff/ditroff/docs/indep_troff )
contains these passages:

| Early in 1979,
| the Computing Science Research Center
| decided to acquire a new typesetter,
| primarily because of our interests in typesetting graphics.
| At the same time,
| the Murray Hill Computer Center
| began to investigate the possibility of replacing their
| family of aging CAT's
| with a new, high-performance typesetter,

then

| Accordingly, in the spring of 1979,
| I set about to modify
| .UC TROFF
| so that it would run hence\%forth without change
| on a variety of typesetters.

then

| This version of
| .UC TROFF
| has been in use
| since September of 1979.
| Most of our experience with it has been on the
| 202 and Tektronix scopes, but the CAT and APS-5 drivers have been
| exercised to some degree.

The "summer vacation" paper gives a similar timeline: 202 acquired in
summer of '79, troff preparatory work done "ahead of time" (consistent
with "spring of 1979" in indep_troff paper), production use by Sept of
1979 just like indep_troff says.  I admit that I was wrong in my first
recollection of 1980 or 81 - but I still have a hard time believing
that there was a _working_ ditroff setup in '78.  Ideas and thoughts
about moving away from CAT-specific troff - sure - but a working setup
is a different story.

But of course I wasn't there, and you say you were...  If ditroff
really did exist in 1978-August when BWK wrote the "Troff tutorial"
paper (the one that appears right away Ossanna's original manual in V7,
4.2BSD and 4.3BSD docs), why does that paper not contain a single word
about it, talking only about the Graphic Systems typesetter?  Was the
existence of ditroff a closely guarded secret then?

Back to my original assertion about \(sq character in Bold having
changed from hollow to filled square while still on CAT-4.  Let's say
I am wrong here and you are right that it became a filled square only
in some non-CAT ditroff setup.  But if ditroff was secret, non-releasable
stuff in 1978 leading up to V7, why did they define "blot" as \fB\(sq\fP
in /usr/pub/eqnchar?  The distributed system (as of V7) contained only
CAT-driving troff and no ditroff - so surely eqnchar was produced to
be usable by users of the as-is distributed system...

My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me otherwise, I
shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7
Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving
troff, and that the filled \(sq in Bold in V7 manuals (in this trofftut
document and eqnchar(7) man page in Vol1) indicates that this filled
square was present in Bold on CAT-4.  Yet this square being hollow in
all 3 font samples in Ossanna's original 1976 manual in the very same
V7 Vol2 indicates that the font was different back in '76.  The only
explanation that fits is that some time between 1976-10 and 1978-08
the Bold film strip on the CAT was changed to an updated version from
GSI.

> This is true - although I believe that the processor was from Autologic,
> the typesetter was from Alphanumeric Corp.

So why are all papers from those days (ditroff docs, Usenix print notes
for 4.3BSD) referring to it as Autologic APS-5?

> the 1978 version of the K&R (which I thought was set on the APS-5 for the
> first version - although it may have been on the Meganthaler).    While I
> still have a first edition, at one time, I had a copy of the proofs, which
> I got from tjk in late 1977 IIRC - it might have been the Fall of '78

Now this part is intriguing.  Wikipedia says the 1st ed of K&R C book
was published February 22, 1978.  Are you *absolutely certain* it was
troffed on APS-5 or Linotron 202 etc?  (I never got a copy, so I don't
have a colophon to look at.)  If this book, published in early 1978,
was indeed produced on a setup that was only possible with ditroff,
then why did BWK tell the story of *beginning* ditroff coding work
(actual implementation, not just thoughts/ideas) in spring of '79 in
preparation for 202 arriving that summer?

Another inexplicable mystery with this hypothesis: if ditroff was in
some working state (good enough to publish a book) in 1978-Feb, why in
the world was it excluded from V7 release - and not only excluded as
in shipping code, but total suppression of any mention of its existence?

> - Alphanumeric Corp released the Alphanumeric Photocomposition System
> (APS) #5 in 1976 using an Autologic-73 mini to drive it.

Thank you for decoding what APS stood for!  Although in my mind it will
probably always be "avtomaticheskiy pistolet Stechkina" in my native
Russian. :-)

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Al Kossow]

The SRI reprints of the 1979 Seventh Edition vols 1 and 2a are on bitsavers now, along with my copy of the Sixth Edition
programmers manual

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Phil Budne]

Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me otherwise, I
> shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7
> Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving
> troff

FWIW (likely little), CAT-driving troff *was* used to drive other
printers, and least for the unwashed.  At Boston University in the mid
80's we had a Talaris 1200 (the same Xerox print engine (2700?) as the
DEC LN01).  The name QMS (and QUIC) were mixed in there was well.  We
had a "qtroff" command that ran the standard 4BSD troff against custom
kerning files (in a.out format!) and interpreted the C/A/T output for
the printer.  Then we got the transcript package from Adobe which had
a "ptroff" command that similarly converted C/A/T output to PostScript(*).

I'm not saying interpreting C/A/T output was done at the mother ship,
but it's not impossible either.  The big wins with [td]itroff were
more than four fonts, and graphics.

(*) Transcript also came with a "psroff" script that would use
ditroff, if you had it, and the original "enscript" command was in the
transcript package.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:

> FWIW (likely little), CAT-driving troff *was* used to drive other
> printers, and least for the unwashed.

Oh yes, I know!  In the branch of UNIX closest to my heart, CSRG at
UCB had vtroff(1) for driving Varian/Versatec raster output devices
with a CAT-emulating post-processor to original troff.  My recent
discovery of scanned 4.2BSD Usenix docs (thank you, Ms. Erica Fischer,
whoever and wherever you are!) tells me that vtroff(1) for casual
prints plus a real CAT for serious typesetting was still the only
troff setup at UCB as of 4.2BSD, i.e., no ditroff yet.  In the days of
4.3BSD CSRG used ditroff internally, but could not ship it because of
licensing nonsense, and by this point some early Xerox EP printer
(speaking Interpress, apparently) replaced Varian/Versatec as the
"default" device for casual prints, whereas APS-5 took the place of
CAT for serious typesetting jobs.

> I'm not saying interpreting C/A/T output was done at the mother ship,
> but it's not impossible either.  The big wins with [td]itroff were
> more than four fonts, and graphics.

Second sentence: I agree absolutely.  But while people did take output
of original troff and converted it to either raster or PostScript,
I am not quite sure if one could drive something like APS-5 in this
manner - I'll have to think about it.

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Clem Cole]

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Nothing was secret.

As for 78 or 79 the typesetter release with the Dennis’s new c compiler was
before v7 which was late 79.  I believe that typesetter and Dennis new C
compiler code was released from Patent and Licensing about a year before
V7.

We had it had CMU before I graduated in early ‘79.  I can ask Steve Glaser
but I remember he telling me he has it at Rice also.  I’m not sure what MIT
but I can ask Ward Cunningham if he remembers if Purdue was using it.
There is some stuff in the early USENIX archives.  As I said I know Tom
Ferris was using the vcat and that the version on the BSD tapes. Rob has
suggested Joy had his version from of vcat Toronto.  Vcat was modified to
talk to ditroff although We all started with the assembler version troff
but Joes C rewrite had leaked and many folks had it outside of the labs.

The version of the compiler from the first Typesetter C release has been
extensively discussed here and in other places although the libS.a from it
is available with search.  Plus K&R1 can be found in used form in the used
market and have at least two copies and I’ve seen an PDF scan in the wild
(it’s poor quality).

What I don’t have is the tape from those days.  I know I have the later
Tool Chest version without the compiler from my Masscomp days - 83/84.  As
well as Adobe Transcript.  This is not the same version we had at CMU and
Tektronix that flavor does not seem to be in anything I have found -
although I did recover the first version of the original CMU fsck.  There
are some files from that recovery I have not examined so I may find that
code at some point.


As for what K&R was set on I don’t remember.   It could have been the C/A/T
in research.  But I thought it was set on the larger and newer system in
the MH computer center.  As I said, I once had a xerographic copy of the
proofs but I know are lost.  That said, the actual book is easy to find in
wild.

BTW Brian K was on Brian Reid’s Thesis Committee in 1979 PHD committee
(Brian Reid wrote Scribe at CMU) and his Thesis was on typesetting.  The
first (Pascal) version of Tex was released by Knuth at Stanford around the
same time(and it’s predessor Stanford’s PUB had been around the ARPanet
sites for at least 4 years on the PDP-10 using the XGPs.

The point is that the ideas in ditroff were all being discussed before Joe
died.  His death in the late 70s forced a rewrite by someone else (Brian)
and the APS-5 in the computer center I remember as the original driver.  I
might be mis remembering but I don’t think so since the dates of the
release of the original typesetter and new compiler code from patent and
licensing as well as the publication date of K&R are well documented as
being on V6 not V7 and all of that is pre Judge Green changes to how ATT
does business 3 years later.

Btw I do have an original V7 manual in a US standard 3 ring binder on a
shelf — as it came from Patent and Licensing  which we had printed in
Teklabs after we go the V7 tape. Btw this is not the funky 2 ring BTL
binding that was used in the labs or the more popular format used for PWB
and later the Marx printing of the BSD manuals and later USENIX BSD
versions. But  Sadly the troff tutorial section is missing - I remember I
used to have a copy of the troff related stuff in a separate file that was
in a shelf in my office next to my terminal and I bet I put the troff
tutorial in it.  I’ll look through some of my file cabinets to see if I can
find that file - I must have put into in a cabinet firing a job change and
might have the missing pages from the binder.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Sat, Jan 6, 2024 at 9:17 PM Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
wrote:

> Hi Clem,
>
> > Hmmm.. I was thinking of keeping out of this food fight, but a couple of
> > comments concern me a little as they seem to differ from the history as I
> > recall it.
>
> Thank you for various juicy details - but I still have a hard time
> accepting your timeline.  BWK's paper "A Typesetter-independent TROFF"
> (troff source here, file date 30-Mar-1983:
> http://medialab.freaknet.org/martin/tape/stuff/ditroff/docs/indep_troff )
> contains these passages:
>
> | Early in 1979,
> | the Computing Science Research Center
> | decided to acquire a new typesetter,
> | primarily because of our interests in typesetting graphics.
> | At the same time,
> | the Murray Hill Computer Center
> | began to investigate the possibility of replacing their
> | family of aging CAT's
> | with a new, high-performance typesetter,
>
> then
>
> | Accordingly, in the spring of 1979,
> | I set about to modify
> | .UC TROFF
> | so that it would run hence\%forth without change
> | on a variety of typesetters.
>
> then
>
> | This version of
> | .UC TROFF
> | has been in use
> | since September of 1979.
> | Most of our experience with it has been on the
> | 202 and Tektronix scopes, but the CAT and APS-5 drivers have been
> | exercised to some degree.
>
> The "summer vacation" paper gives a similar timeline: 202 acquired in
> summer of '79, troff preparatory work done "ahead of time" (consistent
> with "spring of 1979" in indep_troff paper), production use by Sept of
> 1979 just like indep_troff says.  I admit that I was wrong in my first
> recollection of 1980 or 81 - but I still have a hard time believing
> that there was a _working_ ditroff setup in '78.  Ideas and thoughts
> about moving away from CAT-specific troff - sure - but a working setup
> is a different story.
>
> But of course I wasn't there, and you say you were...  If ditroff
> really did exist in 1978-August when BWK wrote the "Troff tutorial"
> paper (the one that appears right away Ossanna's original manual in V7,
> 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD docs), why does that paper not contain a single word
> about it, talking only about the Graphic Systems typesetter?  Was the
> existence of ditroff a closely guarded secret then?
>
> Back to my original assertion about \(sq character in Bold having
> changed from hollow to filled square while still on CAT-4.  Let's say
> I am wrong here and you are right that it became a filled square only
> in some non-CAT ditroff setup.  But if ditroff was secret, non-releasable
> stuff in 1978 leading up to V7, why did they define "blot" as \fB\(sq\fP
> in /usr/pub/eqnchar?  The distributed system (as of V7) contained only
> CAT-driving troff and no ditroff - so surely eqnchar was produced to
> be usable by users of the as-is distributed system...
>
> My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me otherwise, I
> shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7
> Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving
> troff, and that the filled \(sq in Bold in V7 manuals (in this trofftut
> document and eqnchar(7) man page in Vol1) indicates that this filled
> square was present in Bold on CAT-4.  Yet this square being hollow in
> all 3 font samples in Ossanna's original 1976 manual in the very same
> V7 Vol2 indicates that the font was different back in '76.  The only
> explanation that fits is that some time between 1976-10 and 1978-08
> the Bold film strip on the CAT was changed to an updated version from
> GSI.
>
> > This is true - although I believe that the processor was from Autologic,
> > the typesetter was from Alphanumeric Corp.
>
> So why are all papers from those days (ditroff docs, Usenix print notes
> for 4.3BSD) referring to it as Autologic APS-5?
>
> > the 1978 version of the K&R (which I thought was set on the APS-5 for the
> > first version - although it may have been on the Meganthaler).    While I
> > still have a first edition, at one time, I had a copy of the proofs,
> which
> > I got from tjk in late 1977 IIRC - it might have been the Fall of '78
>
> Now this part is intriguing.  Wikipedia says the 1st ed of K&R C book
> was published February 22, 1978.  Are you *absolutely certain* it was
> troffed on APS-5 or Linotron 202 etc?  (I never got a copy, so I don't
> have a colophon to look at.)  If this book, published in early 1978,
> was indeed produced on a setup that was only possible with ditroff,
> then why did BWK tell the story of *beginning* ditroff coding work
> (actual implementation, not just thoughts/ideas) in spring of '79 in
> preparation for 202 arriving that summer?
>
> Another inexplicable mystery with this hypothesis: if ditroff was in
> some working state (good enough to publish a book) in 1978-Feb, why in
> the world was it excluded from V7 release - and not only excluded as
> in shipping code, but total suppression of any mention of its existence?
>
> > - Alphanumeric Corp released the Alphanumeric Photocomposition System
> > (APS) #5 in 1976 using an Autologic-73 mini to drive it.
>
> Thank you for decoding what APS stood for!  Although in my mind it will
> probably always be "avtomaticheskiy pistolet Stechkina" in my native
> Russian. :-)
>
> M~
>

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Michael Parson]

On 2024-01-06 20:17, Mychaela Falconia wrote:

<snip>

>> the 1978 version of the K&R (which I thought was set on the APS-5 for 
>> the
>> first version - although it may have been on the Meganthaler).    
>> While I
>> still have a first edition, at one time, I had a copy of the proofs, 
>> which
>> I got from tjk in late 1977 IIRC - it might have been the Fall of '78
> 
> Now this part is intriguing.  Wikipedia says the 1st ed of K&R C book
> was published February 22, 1978.  Are you *absolutely certain* it was
> troffed on APS-5 or Linotron 202 etc?  (I never got a copy, so I don't
> have a colophon to look at.)  If this book, published in early 1978,
> was indeed produced on a setup that was only possible with ditroff,
> then why did BWK tell the story of *beginning* ditroff coding work
> (actual implementation, not just thoughts/ideas) in spring of '79 in
> preparation for 202 arriving that summer?

My 16th printing of the 1978 K&R C book says:

     This book was set in Time Roman and Courier 12 by the authors, using 
a
     Graphic Systems phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 running under 
the
     UNIX operating system.

     UNIX is a Trademark of Bell Laboratories

Given my understanding of how those pages were made, the 1st ed should 
have
been identical, except that the line showing the "printings" numbers 
would
have looked like:

20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

And maybe a line that said "first edition"

Subsequent printings would have simply masked out that line and the 
numbers
for the other printings, to where my copy just has the numbers 20 down 
to 16.

FWIW, my 13th printing copy of the 1988 ANSI version of the book says:

     UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T.

     This book was typeset (pic|tbl|eqn|troff -mm) in Times Roman and 
Courier
     by the authors, using an Autologic APS-5 phototypesetter and a DEC 
VAX 8550
     running the 9th Edition of the UNIX® operating system.

My copy of the 1984 _The UNIX Programming Environment_ was typeset on on 
a 202
driven by a VAX 11/750 running the 8th edition.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jan 10, 2024 at 11:53 AM Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org> wrote:

> My 16th printing of the 1978 K&R C book says:
>
Thanks for the idea.   I went to the bookshelf.  I had not thought to do
that to see what the book would tell us -- duh.

FWIW:  I have two copies of the '78 edition (K&R1) that has a naked 3, and
the second one has 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 - but still has a CMU Book
Store sticker on its back saying it was $10.95 ;-)   [I used to keep one in
my office and one at home].

So yes, it was set on the GSI C/A/T system, and I'm guessing the 3rd set
was the first one that was actually sent to the printers.
I wish I still had the copies of the proofs from Ted.


ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Brian Walden]

Since this is my work, and it was the first PDF produced from the troff
sources. So let me set the stage, and this should answer some of the
issues you and others have with my work.  This was 25 years ago.
There were not any scanned images of these documents it be
found anywhere online. There was only the incomplete troff sources that were
available on a bell labs web page, and that was hardly usable. I wanted an
online human readable, computer searchable and a print it anywhere document.
That meant one format to me, PDF.

So I went about to produce one. It was so much harder than anticipated.
I spent a lot of my spare time doing it, it took me months to complete.
Someone all ready posted my notes on how I made it in an earlier message.
Once I got it to a state where I was happy with it, I stopped. Also the
only thing I had to compare my version to was a physical copy of a reprint
of the The Bell System Technical Journal Vol 57, No 6, Part 2, July-August
1978 (It had a red cover with the AT&T death star logo, not the original blue
cover, nor the 1984 version with a yellow cover). And the book's pages
were not US printer paper size of 8.5"x11" but were 5"x8".

It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl,
eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU
ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from
them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to
troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979).  That code to produce PostScript
outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by
Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department
45268). As in the mid 1980s, the computer centers had a SRP (small remote
printer) initiative that deployed QMS laser printers (they could only do
PostScript level 1) in common areas near where their users were, and connected
via datakit or direct serial lines. These QMS printers obsoleted the large
and chemically nasty phototypesetters, so they all disappeared from the
computer centers.

Anyway, now I have a whole bunch of PostScript files, that is hardly
usable to read on screen.  Nor very searchable, and ONLY printable on
PostScript printers. The place I was working at the time decided to save
a few dollars, they did not get Adobe licenses for most of their printers,
so they could only print PCL. Luckily the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 3)
which was available on most platforms, could print to PCL. So I need to convert
this into PDF. In 1998 there are not too many options. I tried ghostscript but
it was too immature to produce anything acceptable to me. I ended up buying my
own Adobe Distiller out of pocket, the Windows 95 version, since it was much
cheaper than the Solaris as that was only available as a Distiller "server"
version.

So I then transferred the PostScript files to my windows machine and turned
them into the 3 PDFs. But there was a bug in Distiller, it had and offset
problem on the lines of every tbl, eqn, or pic, on every platform it was
an obvious problem, either viewing it on screen or printing it (both PS and
PCL). So I wrote a awk script to modify many of the PostScript files to fix
the wrong offset. If you viewed or printed a modified PS file, it looked like
it had offset error, but now in the opposite direction. But once distilled
into a PDF, that PDF looked and printed like it should. So those modified PS
files wound be of no value to share. I then manually add the bookmarks and
blank pages that allowed two side printing using the same windows distiller.

I had shown it to some others and they thought it was pretty great. But I
cannot publish nor host these as this is not my intellectual property and
I would need permission. At this time there was not very much available on
TUHS, some binary versions all without any source code, that you could boot
up on SIMH.

I decided I should drop a note to Dennis Ritchie with a copy of the PDFs
to see what he tought. Since I had known Dennis slightly from my time working
at Murray Hill. I lived across the street from the labs on Burlington Rd and
skateboarded into work. It was just across the east employee parking lot, and I
 would use that eastern entrance.  Dennis also lived in the neighborhood, a
bit farther from the labs than me, in a cul-de-sac.  For a full week once,
Dennis kept the complete opposite hours than I did. We would passed each other
at the guard station at the entrance. After a few times it got to be a bit
comical. Me entering 9ish, "good night Dennis" He would smile. Me leaving
5-6ish: "good morning Dennis". We would exchange pleasantries. I had
to walk the skateboard past the guard a bit and not jump back on it, else the
guard would give chase, yelling not to skate in the hallway. I always had the
idea if someone wanted to sneak into the labs they'd just need to wait for
me to go in in the morning, and once the guard was chasing me, they could just
walk on in unchallenged. If you worked in MH from 1990-1992 and saw someone
on a black on top, neon green bottom skateboard, headed from 2F-164 to the
stock room, that was me.

Dennis really like the PDFs, and we had a email discussion on what to do with
it as it was a derivative work of copyrighted material that I did not have the
rights to. He said he needed to do some checking (lawyers?). Eventually he
said they would host the PDFs, as it was their property, but would give me
full credit for producing it. And once it was freely available on their site,
anyone, including myself, could host copies. I provided Dennis with all the
added files and all the modified versions of their files, the new run shell and
sed scripts and even the awk postscript pre-distiller fixer script. He (or
Lucent) declined not put them up along side the PDFs, for whatever reason,
and since they were not providing them, I was not to give out those files
either.  Only files I made myself or the files I found that were all ready
available by Lucent (such as the missing headers) were OK for me to host too.
This is that v7add.tar.gz file you found, that I only hosted.

I also decided (and I told Dennis) I was going to make it so I could identify
the PDF files that was my work. In volume 2B, I fixed the typo "oe" to "one"
on the RATFOR paper, and I figured no one is going to put in a typo back in.
In volume 2A on the "UNIX Programming" page I left the .ND macro as is so
it would print the date it was troff'd (December 3, 1998).

I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th Edition C Reference Manual
in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is
the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could
provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I
was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it.

I was going to do something similar to volume 1, but I forgot to do it
before that December 3rd run and it got sent to Dennis without a change.
And I was not going to tell Dennis and say hey pull that one down and put
this one up, thanks. Too late is simply too late.

That at some point after they had been out for a while I noticed Dennis added
gzipped postscript versions of them, and credited it to Aharon Robbins, who
still posts here. I was upset at first, as it looked like half the credit was
going to someone who did a print to file and then ran gzip on it.  And second,
the point of the PDF was so it could print anywhere, those cannot.  Anyway
I got over it, as none it was mine to start with. And most would probably
use the PDF anyway.

Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the PDFs too, in 1999 or
2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them
and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but
I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not.
This work is truly lost.

The next, and last, time I saw Dennis was at the 2000 Summer USENIX in San
Diego. I just thought it was funny the looks I got from people when he came
up to me to say hello.

-Brian

Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>
> > My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications
> > colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq
> > special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by
> > Bell Labs,
>
> I disagree.  While the "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual" document proves
> that \(sq was hollow in all 3 fonts _as of 1976-10-11_ (the original
> date of this doc), bwk's document from 1978-08-04 indicates that this
> char had to have changed to a filled square by this date.  However,
> troff in 1978 was still completely, utterly incapable of driving
> anything other than a C/A/T!  Now bwk, the author of this doc, is the
> very same fine gentleman who wrote ditroff, the creature that was
> finally capable of driving a Linotron 202 or Autologic APS-5 or
> whatever - but the timeline does not match up.  BWK's troff tutorial
> is dated 1978-08-04, but his work on ditroff (as I understand it)
> happened some time around 1980 or 1981.  He may have started ditroff
> work in 1979, but definitely not in 1978.
>
> > but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5.
>
> 4.3BSD Usenix books prove otherwise: these must have been troffed on
> APS-5, as many notes from that time attest, but they feature hollow
> square in bold.  Even eqnchar(7) is "wrong" in 4.3BSD print in that
> "blot" is a hollow square, clearly counter to original intent of that
> named eqn character.
>
> > I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page,
>
> Ahh, so you are involved with groff - got it.  I wrote my own version
> of troff (based on V7, running under 4.3BSD and directly emitting
> DSC-conforming PostScript) in 3 "bursts" of work around 2004, 2010 and
> 2012, but I never got around to releasing it.  I am now in the process
> of cleaning it up for release, hoping to finally have it out in another
> week or two.  And I put a _lot_ of work into replicating the original
> troff character set...
>
> > Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that
> > the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition
>
> Thank you for clarifying what HRW is - so this 1983 version of 7th ed
> UPM is *not* the original?
>
> > > What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
> > > book?
> >
> > The HRW copies I have are perfect bound.  But I can't remember if they
> > were 3-hole punched as well.
>
> Thank you for the clarification!  But if HRW version is not the
> original, then what was the original like?
>
> > Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of
> > the V7 Volume 2 manual?
>
> https://plan9.io/7thEdMan/bswv7.html
> http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/
>
> The second page includes a link to this tarball:
>
> http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/v7add.tar.gz
>
> Dates inside that tarball are 1998-12-13.  There was also a place
> where Brian missed the retroffing date - see page 287 of his
> v7vol2a.pdf.
>
> > I have wondered about this for years.  In part
> > to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the
> > original, it is not perfect,
>
> What _I_ don't like about BSW's PDF rendition of V7 manuals is that it
> is a sort of "closed source" product: there is no published source
> package that retraces every step in the flow from ancient troff sources
> to the finished product.
>
> In the same 3 "bursts" of activity (2004, 2010 and 2012) when I worked
> on my own version of troff, I also worked toward doing a PostScript
> reprint of 4.3BSD Usenix books.  4.3BSD happens to be my personally
> preferred version of UNIX, but the same methods I use for 4.3BSD books
> can also be applied to V7.  I am hoping that in the next week or two I
> will find time to release not only my version of troff, but also the
> partial set of 4.3BSD books I got done so far.
>
> Out of the 7 books that comprise 4.3BSD Usenix set, the breakdown is
> as follows:
>
> * URM, PRM and USD: I got these done already, only need to write new
> colophons to be added to the end of each book.  These are the ones I
> am hoping to put out Real Soon Now.
>
> * PS1, PS2 and SMM remain to be worked on, but are part of my more
> distant plans.
>
> * The "Master Index" volume, I plan to skip that one - too difficult,
> and non-essential in my view.
>
> And yes, I am much more "perfectionist" about replicating troff details
> than BSW was for his V7 PDF version.
>
> M~
>

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[arnold]

Thanks for this history Brian.

It was a long time ago, but I think all I did was figure out how
to turn the PDF back into postscript, since I had a postscript printer
at the time and it was easier for me to print postscript.

I sent the files to Dennis _only_ with the thought that they might be
useful to other people, and certainly with no intent to steal any credit.

Your files were great; I printed out hardcopy at the time and
still have them on a shelf in my basement.

Thanks!

Arnold

Brian Walden <tuhs@cuzuco.com> wrote:

> Since this is my work, and it was the first PDF produced from the troff
> sources. So let me set the stage, and this should answer some of the
> issues you and others have with my work.  This was 25 years ago.
> There were not any scanned images of these documents it be
> found anywhere online. There was only the incomplete troff sources that were
> available on a bell labs web page, and that was hardly usable. I wanted an
> online human readable, computer searchable and a print it anywhere document.
> That meant one format to me, PDF.
>
> So I went about to produce one. It was so much harder than anticipated.
> I spent a lot of my spare time doing it, it took me months to complete.
> Someone all ready posted my notes on how I made it in an earlier message.
> Once I got it to a state where I was happy with it, I stopped. Also the
> only thing I had to compare my version to was a physical copy of a reprint
> of the The Bell System Technical Journal Vol 57, No 6, Part 2, July-August
> 1978 (It had a red cover with the AT&T death star logo, not the original blue
> cover, nor the 1984 version with a yellow cover). And the book's pages
> were not US printer paper size of 8.5"x11" but were 5"x8".
>
> It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl,
> eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU
> ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from
> them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to
> troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979).  That code to produce PostScript
> outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by
> Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department
> 45268). As in the mid 1980s, the computer centers had a SRP (small remote
> printer) initiative that deployed QMS laser printers (they could only do
> PostScript level 1) in common areas near where their users were, and connected
> via datakit or direct serial lines. These QMS printers obsoleted the large
> and chemically nasty phototypesetters, so they all disappeared from the
> computer centers.
>
> Anyway, now I have a whole bunch of PostScript files, that is hardly
> usable to read on screen.  Nor very searchable, and ONLY printable on
> PostScript printers. The place I was working at the time decided to save
> a few dollars, they did not get Adobe licenses for most of their printers,
> so they could only print PCL. Luckily the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 3)
> which was available on most platforms, could print to PCL. So I need to convert
> this into PDF. In 1998 there are not too many options. I tried ghostscript but
> it was too immature to produce anything acceptable to me. I ended up buying my
> own Adobe Distiller out of pocket, the Windows 95 version, since it was much
> cheaper than the Solaris as that was only available as a Distiller "server"
> version.
>
> So I then transferred the PostScript files to my windows machine and turned
> them into the 3 PDFs. But there was a bug in Distiller, it had and offset
> problem on the lines of every tbl, eqn, or pic, on every platform it was
> an obvious problem, either viewing it on screen or printing it (both PS and
> PCL). So I wrote a awk script to modify many of the PostScript files to fix
> the wrong offset. If you viewed or printed a modified PS file, it looked like
> it had offset error, but now in the opposite direction. But once distilled
> into a PDF, that PDF looked and printed like it should. So those modified PS
> files wound be of no value to share. I then manually add the bookmarks and
> blank pages that allowed two side printing using the same windows distiller.
>
> I had shown it to some others and they thought it was pretty great. But I
> cannot publish nor host these as this is not my intellectual property and
> I would need permission. At this time there was not very much available on
> TUHS, some binary versions all without any source code, that you could boot
> up on SIMH.
>
> I decided I should drop a note to Dennis Ritchie with a copy of the PDFs
> to see what he tought. Since I had known Dennis slightly from my time working
> at Murray Hill. I lived across the street from the labs on Burlington Rd and
> skateboarded into work. It was just across the east employee parking lot, and I
>  would use that eastern entrance.  Dennis also lived in the neighborhood, a
> bit farther from the labs than me, in a cul-de-sac.  For a full week once,
> Dennis kept the complete opposite hours than I did. We would passed each other
> at the guard station at the entrance. After a few times it got to be a bit
> comical. Me entering 9ish, "good night Dennis" He would smile. Me leaving
> 5-6ish: "good morning Dennis". We would exchange pleasantries. I had
> to walk the skateboard past the guard a bit and not jump back on it, else the
> guard would give chase, yelling not to skate in the hallway. I always had the
> idea if someone wanted to sneak into the labs they'd just need to wait for
> me to go in in the morning, and once the guard was chasing me, they could just
> walk on in unchallenged. If you worked in MH from 1990-1992 and saw someone
> on a black on top, neon green bottom skateboard, headed from 2F-164 to the
> stock room, that was me.
>
> Dennis really like the PDFs, and we had a email discussion on what to do with
> it as it was a derivative work of copyrighted material that I did not have the
> rights to. He said he needed to do some checking (lawyers?). Eventually he
> said they would host the PDFs, as it was their property, but would give me
> full credit for producing it. And once it was freely available on their site,
> anyone, including myself, could host copies. I provided Dennis with all the
> added files and all the modified versions of their files, the new run shell and
> sed scripts and even the awk postscript pre-distiller fixer script. He (or
> Lucent) declined not put them up along side the PDFs, for whatever reason,
> and since they were not providing them, I was not to give out those files
> either.  Only files I made myself or the files I found that were all ready
> available by Lucent (such as the missing headers) were OK for me to host too.
> This is that v7add.tar.gz file you found, that I only hosted.
>
> I also decided (and I told Dennis) I was going to make it so I could identify
> the PDF files that was my work. In volume 2B, I fixed the typo "oe" to "one"
> on the RATFOR paper, and I figured no one is going to put in a typo back in.
> In volume 2A on the "UNIX Programming" page I left the .ND macro as is so
> it would print the date it was troff'd (December 3, 1998).
>
> I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th Edition C Reference Manual
> in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is
> the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could
> provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I
> was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it.
>
> I was going to do something similar to volume 1, but I forgot to do it
> before that December 3rd run and it got sent to Dennis without a change.
> And I was not going to tell Dennis and say hey pull that one down and put
> this one up, thanks. Too late is simply too late.
>
> That at some point after they had been out for a while I noticed Dennis added
> gzipped postscript versions of them, and credited it to Aharon Robbins, who
> still posts here. I was upset at first, as it looked like half the credit was
> going to someone who did a print to file and then ran gzip on it.  And second,
> the point of the PDF was so it could print anywhere, those cannot.  Anyway
> I got over it, as none it was mine to start with. And most would probably
> use the PDF anyway.
>
> Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the PDFs too, in 1999 or
> 2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them
> and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but
> I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not.
> This work is truly lost.
>
> The next, and last, time I saw Dennis was at the 2000 Summer USENIX in San
> Diego. I just thought it was funny the looks I got from people when he came
> up to me to say hello.
>
> -Brian
>
> Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> > G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> >
> > > My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications
> > > colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq
> > > special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by
> > > Bell Labs,
> >
> > I disagree.  While the "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual" document proves
> > that \(sq was hollow in all 3 fonts _as of 1976-10-11_ (the original
> > date of this doc), bwk's document from 1978-08-04 indicates that this
> > char had to have changed to a filled square by this date.  However,
> > troff in 1978 was still completely, utterly incapable of driving
> > anything other than a C/A/T!  Now bwk, the author of this doc, is the
> > very same fine gentleman who wrote ditroff, the creature that was
> > finally capable of driving a Linotron 202 or Autologic APS-5 or
> > whatever - but the timeline does not match up.  BWK's troff tutorial
> > is dated 1978-08-04, but his work on ditroff (as I understand it)
> > happened some time around 1980 or 1981.  He may have started ditroff
> > work in 1979, but definitely not in 1978.
> >
> > > but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5.
> >
> > 4.3BSD Usenix books prove otherwise: these must have been troffed on
> > APS-5, as many notes from that time attest, but they feature hollow
> > square in bold.  Even eqnchar(7) is "wrong" in 4.3BSD print in that
> > "blot" is a hollow square, clearly counter to original intent of that
> > named eqn character.
> >
> > > I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page,
> >
> > Ahh, so you are involved with groff - got it.  I wrote my own version
> > of troff (based on V7, running under 4.3BSD and directly emitting
> > DSC-conforming PostScript) in 3 "bursts" of work around 2004, 2010 and
> > 2012, but I never got around to releasing it.  I am now in the process
> > of cleaning it up for release, hoping to finally have it out in another
> > week or two.  And I put a _lot_ of work into replicating the original
> > troff character set...
> >
> > > Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that
> > > the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition
> >
> > Thank you for clarifying what HRW is - so this 1983 version of 7th ed
> > UPM is *not* the original?
> >
> > > > What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
> > > > book?
> > >
> > > The HRW copies I have are perfect bound.  But I can't remember if they
> > > were 3-hole punched as well.
> >
> > Thank you for the clarification!  But if HRW version is not the
> > original, then what was the original like?
> >
> > > Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of
> > > the V7 Volume 2 manual?
> >
> > https://plan9.io/7thEdMan/bswv7.html
> > http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/
> >
> > The second page includes a link to this tarball:
> >
> > http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/v7add.tar.gz
> >
> > Dates inside that tarball are 1998-12-13.  There was also a place
> > where Brian missed the retroffing date - see page 287 of his
> > v7vol2a.pdf.
> >
> > > I have wondered about this for years.  In part
> > > to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the
> > > original, it is not perfect,
> >
> > What _I_ don't like about BSW's PDF rendition of V7 manuals is that it
> > is a sort of "closed source" product: there is no published source
> > package that retraces every step in the flow from ancient troff sources
> > to the finished product.
> >
> > In the same 3 "bursts" of activity (2004, 2010 and 2012) when I worked
> > on my own version of troff, I also worked toward doing a PostScript
> > reprint of 4.3BSD Usenix books.  4.3BSD happens to be my personally
> > preferred version of UNIX, but the same methods I use for 4.3BSD books
> > can also be applied to V7.  I am hoping that in the next week or two I
> > will find time to release not only my version of troff, but also the
> > partial set of 4.3BSD books I got done so far.
> >
> > Out of the 7 books that comprise 4.3BSD Usenix set, the breakdown is
> > as follows:
> >
> > * URM, PRM and USD: I got these done already, only need to write new
> > colophons to be added to the end of each book.  These are the ones I
> > am hoping to put out Real Soon Now.
> >
> > * PS1, PS2 and SMM remain to be worked on, but are part of my more
> > distant plans.
> >
> > * The "Master Index" volume, I plan to skip that one - too difficult,
> > and non-essential in my view.
> >
> > And yes, I am much more "perfectionist" about replicating troff details
> > than BSW was for his V7 PDF version.
> >
> > M~
> >

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Brian,

> Since this is my work, and it was the first PDF produced from the troff
> sources. So let me set the stage, and this should answer some of the
> issues you and others have with my work.  This was 25 years ago.

Thank you for this very detailed account!  It certainly helps clear
the air, and helps people like me (who weren't there at the time)
understand this history a little better.

> So I went about to produce one. It was so much harder than anticipated.
> I spent a lot of my spare time doing it, it took me months to complete.
> Someone all ready posted my notes on how I made it in an earlier message.
> Once I got it to a state where I was happy with it, I stopped.

I am doing something similar with 4.3BSD manuals.  When I started on
this quest in 2004, I didn't have any reference for how the original
looked, I was flying blind, and the draft I produced that year was so
poor (by my own judgment) that I never took it further.  In 2010 I was
able to score a real paper copy (relic) of 4.3BSD Usenix print, I made
some improvements to my troff, but then I had to put it down and
switch to other projects.  I picked it up again in 2012, got URM and
PRM books done (these are easy, man pages only, 4.3BSD equiv of Vol1),
was working on USD book (first big book of supplementary docs, has all
docs for troff suite), but then again I got switched to a different
(and very big) project, the one in my current domain name.

I am revisiting it now, and I was _*very*_ pleased when I found
published scans on archive.org, by Erica Fischer, of all Usenix books
from *both* 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD sets, uploaded in 2017.  Now I don't
have to feel guilty about "hoarding" my treasured physical copy of the
original Usenix 4.3BSD print!  I still desire to finish my PostScript
reprint of all 6 4.3BSD books: the historical ones I got are very
fragile, the plastic binding combs already got several broken teeth,
and given that I like to use 4.3BSD "for real", I would really love to
have physical reference books on my bookshelf that aren't fragile and
can take abuse - hence the desire for a new physical print.  Plus the
feel-good of publishing PostScript files, one perfectly DSC-conforming
PS file for each book, that anyone in the community can do with as they
please, plus full recipes for recreating them...

If someone desires a more perfectionist PostScript reprint of the V7
manual, let's revisit this discussion in another few weeks when I put
out my current reprints of 4.3BSD URM, USD and PRM - it will be easier
to refer to those when discussing possible ideas for V7.

> It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl,
> eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU
> ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from
> them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to
> troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979).

You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much more
"right" than anything from GNU.

> That code to produce PostScript
> outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by
> Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department
> 45268).

So it is a different ditroff-to-PS chain than psdit from Adobe
Transcript?  I am not too familiar with the latter, as I ended up
writing my own troff (derived from V7 version, just published) that
emits PS directly, but it is my understanding that Back In The Day
most people used psdit for this type of workflow.

> I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th Edition C Reference
> Manual
> in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is
> the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could
> provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I
> was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it.

Ouch, until you pointed it out in this ML post, I hadn't even noticed
that the C Reference Manual doc is "wrong" in your PDF version!  But
here comes the really important question: if you once had a PDF reprint
with the "right" version of this doc, where did you get the troff
source for it?  This is the source that was actually censored from the
V7 tape:

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cman

I don't have this problem for my 4.3BSD reprint: the source for 4.3BSD
version of this doc is included on the tape; the corresponding SCCS
log begins with "document received from AT&T", checked in on 86/05/14,
and then revised by BSD people into what they wanted printed in their
version of the manual.  But if someone wishes to do a *proper* reprint
of the V7 manual (or 4.2BSD, where this doc and many others were
literally unchanged duplications from V7 master at the plate level),
we need the troff source for the V7 version of this doc.

If this source is totally lost, we as in community can probably do an
OCR from a surviving scan (for example, the one in 4.2BSD PSD book)
and then painstakingly produce a new troff source that would format
into an exact replica - but if there is a leaked copy of the original
source somewhere, it would certainly make our job way easier.

> Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the PDFs too, in 1999 or
> 2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them
> and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but
> I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not.
> This work is truly lost.

Aside from the unresolved issue of "cman" document, we as in community
can produce an even better work if we so wish.  I am deferring a more
detailed discussion until I put out my 4.3BSD PS reprint, so I can
point to it as a reference for how I like to do things, and maybe by
then we'll have some clarity on what happened to V7 "cman" troff source.

M~

[TUHS] My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,

After almost 20 y of intermittent development (started in the fall of
2004), I just made the first official release of my version of troff:

https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.Z
https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.gz

(The .Z is the native format; the .gz is for greater accessibility.)

The README file inside the tarball gives the full story, but basically
it is my own derivative from classic V7 troff (not derived from
ditroff, and certainly not groff) that runs under 4.3BSD and emits
PostScript.  Only PS output is supported, no non-PS targets of ditroff.
I started it in 2004, but I still use it to this day (on a real
MicroVAX running my "organically grown" 4.3BSD variant) to write
various TPS reports and technical manuals etc, for my other projects
that don't have much of anything to do with Ancient UNIX.

For anyone who loves intricacies of troff and/or PostScript, you might
find the source code quite interesting to study. :)

Some Time Soon I am hoping to put out my PostScript reprint of the
first 3 books of the 4.3BSD manual set (namely, URM, USD and PRM books)
made with this troff.  The actual book reformatting job is already done
(for these 3 books, not for the other 3 yet), but I need to write new
colophons to be appended (with pstmerge, a tool from my troff suite)
at the end of each book.  (The colophons I wrote for URM and PRM back
in 2012 are in need of corrections and updates, and I didn't have the
USD book done in 2012.)

I will also be responding to BSW's detailed account of V7 PDF reprint
in the other thread shortly - but I wanted to get this troff release
out first, so I won't be in a position of saying "please look at my
creation" when that creation is not publicly accessible.

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5563 bytes --]

At 2024-01-07T16:20:35-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> > It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the
> > troff, tbl, eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that
> > time, and NOT any GNU ones. Why? These were the versions written by
> > AT&T that Sun got directly from them during their SVR4
> > collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to troff (which
> > obviously did not exist in 1979).
> 
> You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much
> more "right" than anything from GNU.

This sort of broad, nonspecific, reflexive derogation of groff (or GNU
generally) is unproductive and frequently indicative of ignorance.

Admittedly, groff does not attempt pixel-perfect reproduction of classic
Unix documentation, particularly not C/A/T output.

There's a good reason for that, and one that will challenge your efforts
as well, if you draw your scope as far back as the C/A/T.  (If your
horizon is 4.3BSD documents rendered as PostScript, you may be in luck.)
The problem is fonts.

The C/A/T's fonts did not even exist in the digital domain.  They were
produced from photographic plates.  Their reproduction is consequently
something of a pickle.

The good news is that the Adobe PostScript Times faces and their URW
clone are "pretty close" equivalents.  Close enough that I was able to
reproduce Kernighan & Cherry's "Typesetting Mathematics User's Guide --
Second Edition" (a.k.a. "the eqn manual") with fairly high fidelity.

https://github.com/g-branden-robinson/retypesetting-mathematics

This work required (1) some bug fixes to the GNU ms macros, now applied;
and (2) fine-tuning of the line length and page offset to compensate for
the different metrics of Adobe/URW Times versus the C/A/T's.

There is a third problem, whose resolution is in progress, when
producing PDF output from this document; slanted Greek symbols are
present but "not quite right".  This is because unlike PostScript, PDF
font repertoires generally don't provide a "slanted symbol" face.
gropdf author Deri James has committed some work to groff's Git
repository synthesizing such a face.  We expect it in groff 1.24.

But if you are going for pixel-perfect reproduction of documents that
used fonts you don't have, you're going to need to recreate the fonts
somehow--perfectly (at least for the glyphs that a given document uses).
One of the reasons Knuth was able to be so meticulously perfectionistic
with TeX and avoid regressions at the pixel placement level is because
he developed his own fonts along with just about everything else.  AT&T
troff did not make that choice.

Like AT&T troff, groff attempts to be a practical typesetting system.
One way I measure its success is by the fact that practiced AT&T troff
users like Brian Kernighan[1] and Doug McIlroy[2] use it for the
composition of new works, and speak of it with approval.  (Doug reports
bugs, some of which we manage to address.)

groff is not, primarily, a vehicle for nostalgia trips.

> After almost 20 y of intermittent development (started in the fall of
> 2004), I just made the first official release of my version of troff:
>
> https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.Z
> https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.gz

But there is room in the world for such things, particularly if they are
Free Software.  I was unable to determine that qjtroff is, except for a
few portions retaining UC Regents' copyright notices from the 1980s,[3]
and if these contain further original work by you (or others), then the
lack of a clear copyright notice and licensing information renders the
project "all rights reserved", meaning among other things that people
cannot redistribute to others, let alone make modifications--say, to add
the documentation that is not present.

README:
> Documentation: in 2012 I started writing a proper manual, but ran out
> of time (had to switch to other projects).  Because it can easily be
> another year or two or ... before I can get back to that documentation
> and finish it, I decided to release this software as-is, without docs.
> Too many projects, too little time...

In any event, the groff mailing list is the de facto water cooler for
all *roff developers, and I invite you to join it to stay abreast of
developments.  Discussion of non-groff *roffs is rare but welcomed.
Since there is no standard for *roff, it is the most useful forum for
discussion of, for instance, unspecified details of formatter or macro
package behavior.

(Unfortunately, sometimes people ask for help with Heirloom Doctools
troff and receive solutions that are applicable only to groff;
Heirloom's own community seems sadly too shy, or perhaps too attenuated,
to share its expertise.)

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://technicallywewrite.com/2023/06/01/groff
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-07/msg00062.html

[3] There were also Adobe copyright notices in AFM files, which are not
    necessarily a problem since font _metrics_ are not copyrightable[4]
    and of course several false positives arising from the existence of
    "copyright" as a named glyph in fonts.

[4] At least not in the United States, and perhaps not in many countries
    of the world that are signatories to the various trade treaties
    (URAA-GATT, TRIPS, and so forth) through which WIPO has exported
    U.S. copyright law to a nearly global scope.  IANAL.  TINLA.

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> This sort of broad, nonspecific, reflexive derogation of groff (or GNU
> generally) is unproductive and frequently indicative of ignorance.

I don't have enough spoons to engage in political fights any more, so
I'll just focus on technical aspects.

> The C/A/T's fonts did not even exist in the digital domain.  They were
> produced from photographic plates.  Their reproduction is consequently
> something of a pickle.

I am very keenly aware of this fact!

> But if you are going for pixel-perfect reproduction of documents that
> used fonts you don't have, you're going to need to recreate the fonts
> somehow--perfectly (at least for the glyphs that a given document uses).

The problem you are describing is one which I am *not* actively working
on presently.  I am _contemplating_ this problem, but not actively
working on it.  In my current stage of 4.3BSD document set reprinting,
I am willing to accept that hyphenations, line breaks and page breaks
will be different from the original because of slightly different font
metrics, and accept the use of only fi and fl ligatures (in running
text, outside of explicit demonstrations) because Adobe's version
dropped ff, ffi and ffl.  (In places where original troff docs
explicitly demonstrate the use of all 5 ligatures, I have a hack that
pulls the missing ligs from a different, not-really-matching font.)

I am willing to accept this imperfection because it is fundamentally
no different from what UCB/Usenix themselves did in 1986: they took
Bell Labs docs that were originally written for CAT and troffed them
on their APS-5 ditroff setup - but those two typesetters also had
slight diffs in their font metrics, causing line and page breaks to
move around!

OTOH I am very willing to entertain, as an intellectual exercise, what
would it take to produce a new font set that would *truly* replicate
the CAT font set at Bell Labs.  The spacing widths of the original
fonts (the key determinant of where breaks will land) are known, right
here:

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/tab3.c

Back in 2004 in one afternoon I threw together a quick-hack program
that takes the output of original troff (CAT binary codes) and prints
it in PostScript, using standard Adobe fonts.  The character
positioning is that of original troff, but because the actual font
characters don't perfectly match these metrics, the result is not
pretty - but the non-pretty result does show *exactly* where every
line and page break lands per original intent!

So what would it take to do such a re-creation properly?  My feeling
is that the task would require hiring a professional typeface designer
to produce a modified version of Times font family: modify the fonts
to produce good visual results (change actual characters as needed) to
fit the prescribed, unchangeable metrics as in spacing widths.  And
design all 5 f-ligatures while at it.

I have no slightest idea how much it would cost to hire a professional
typeface designer to do what I just described, hence I have no idea
whether or not it is something that the hobbyist community could
potentially afford, even collectively.  But it is an interesting idea
to ponder nonetheless - which is where I leave it for now.

> There is a third problem, whose resolution is in progress, when
> producing PDF output from this document; slanted Greek symbols are
> present but "not quite right".  This is because unlike PostScript, PDF
> font repertoires generally don't provide a "slanted symbol" face.

Can you please elaborate?  I personally hate PDF with a passion, but I
concede that in order to make my documents readable by people other
than me, I have to rcp my .ps file from the 4.3BSD machine to a
semi-modern-ish (Slackware) Linux box and run ps2pdf on the file.
But what "slanted symbol" font are you talking about that exists in
PostScript but not in PDF?  The only PostScript fonts whose existence
I take as a given (as opposed to downloading the font explicitly) are
the standard 14: 4 Times family fonts, 4 Helvetica family fonts, 4
Courier family fonts, Symbol and ZapfDingbats.  Which of these 14 is
missing in PDF, and how does "standard" ps2pdf (Ghostscript) handle it?

> Like AT&T troff, groff attempts to be a practical typesetting system.

I wrote *my* version of troff with exact same goals, and I've been
using it as my personal everyday TPS report formatter for the past 20 y.
It's just that for deeply personal reasons which I would rather not go
into on this list, I chose to develop my own tool instead of using one
that bears GNU branding.  I also wanted my troff to run under 4.3BSD,
using only K&R C, which I reason would probably be impossible with
groff.  (I recall reading somewhere that groff is written in C++ - so
it is completely out of consideration for something that needs to run
under 4.3BSD.)

> But there is room in the world for such things, particularly if they are
> Free Software.  I was unable to determine that qjtroff is, except for a
> few portions retaining UC Regents' copyright notices from the 1980s,[3]

My software is written BY a pirate (me) FOR other pirates.  If you are
not a pirate, my sw is not for you.

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-01-07T21:10:38-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > This sort of broad, nonspecific, reflexive derogation of groff (or
> > GNU generally) is unproductive and frequently indicative of
> > ignorance.
> 
> I don't have enough spoons to engage in political fights any more, so
> I'll just focus on technical aspects.

That may be a wise choice.  A good supplement would be, when expressing
a negative opinion of GNU or any software project to which people
contribute their volunteer labor, to briefly state your grounds for not
using it.  "I just can't go along with the copyleft thing" or "I refuse
to use anything written in C++" might or might not strike people as
rational, but such frankness places the responsibility for starting an
argument squarely on _their_ shoulders.

Any issues people have with groff's implementation quality should be
submitted to its bug tracker.  (One can do so anonymously, or create an
account to be emailed when subsequent activity happens.)  There are
plenty of defects demanding repair and features needing implementation.
I wish there were fewer.  I do what I can.

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff

> > But if you are going for pixel-perfect reproduction of documents
> > that used fonts you don't have, you're going to need to recreate the
> > fonts somehow--perfectly (at least for the glyphs that a given
> > document uses).
> 
> The problem you are describing is one which I am *not* actively
> working on presently.  I am _contemplating_ this problem, but not
> actively working on it.  In my current stage of 4.3BSD document set
> reprinting, I am willing to accept that hyphenations, line breaks and
> page breaks will be different from the original because of slightly
> different font metrics, and accept the use of only fi and fl ligatures
> (in running text, outside of explicit demonstrations) because Adobe's
> version dropped ff, ffi and ffl.  (In places where original troff docs
> explicitly demonstrate the use of all 5 ligatures, I have a hack that
> pulls the missing ligs from a different, not-really-matching font.)
> 
> I am willing to accept this imperfection because it is fundamentally
> no different from what UCB/Usenix themselves did in 1986: they took
> Bell Labs docs that were originally written for CAT and troffed them
> on their APS-5 ditroff setup - but those two typesetters also had
> slight diffs in their font metrics, causing line and page breaks to
> move around!

Right.  I think this is a reasonable place to erect a threshold of
"fidelity" in document rendering, for two reasons: (1) when you don't
have control over the fonts in use, it's likely the best you can do
anyway, and (2) as a document author you might want to leave yourself
room to change your mind about the typeface you use, particularly for
running text (which will have the greatest impact on the locations of
line and page breaks for most documents).

That I was able to get the breaks in "Typesetting Mathematics" almost
all the same as the published version even though the Times I used was
certainly not the C/A/T's was a due to a combination of (a) good fortune
and (b) the power of binary search when selecting values for the LL and
PO registers.

> OTOH I am very willing to entertain, as an intellectual exercise, what
> would it take to produce a new font set that would *truly* replicate
> the CAT font set at Bell Labs.  The spacing widths of the original
> fonts (the key determinant of where breaks will land) are known, right
> here:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/tab3.c

Right.  Nowadays we call these (and other measurements besides width)
the "font metrics".

> Back in 2004 in one afternoon I threw together a quick-hack program
> that takes the output of original troff (CAT binary codes) and prints
> it in PostScript, using standard Adobe fonts.  The character
> positioning is that of original troff, but because the actual font
> characters don't perfectly match these metrics, the result is not
> pretty - but the non-pretty result does show *exactly* where every
> line and page break lands per original intent!

Nice!  A tool I'd like to get added to groff someday is a modern
"cat2dit".  It's come up on these mailing lists before; apparently Adobe
had a proprietary one back in the 1980s, and, as I recall, polymath
wizard Henry Spencer wrote one but it's long since become a relic.  John
Gardner wrote yet another but it's in JavaScript so not maximally
convenient for a Unix command line grognard.

But best of all would be a "cat2dit" in Seventh Edition Unix-compatible
C, because that would be super convenient for running on a PDP-11 under
SIMH using Ossanna troff.  The output would be easy to export because
the device-independent troff output format is plain text (and not too
strict about whitespace), and SIMH of course runs in a terminal window
so it's easy to copy and paste.  This would make it much easier to use
Ossanna troff as a regression test bed for groff (or other modern
formatters).

> So what would it take to do such a re-creation properly?  My feeling
> is that the task would require hiring a professional typeface designer
> to produce a modified version of Times font family: modify the fonts
> to produce good visual results (change actual characters as needed) to
> fit the prescribed, unchangeable metrics as in spacing widths.  And
> design all 5 f-ligatures while at it.

Another approach would be to obtain the C/A/T font plates and describe
them numerically.  Since the only means of scaling was via an optical
lens (from 6 to 36 points), we can conclude that they weren't "hinted"
as digital fonts often are.  Since those plates are presumably nearly
all in landfills these days I suppose the same could be accomplished
with sufficiently high-resolution scans of the copy of CSTR #54 in the
Seventh Edition Unix manual (because it depicts all possibly glyphs).

And of course if a person wants a gratuitous thing to put on their
résumé/CV, you could obtain a large number of Times roman faces from a
variety of foundries, render a huge volume of text using them in every
possible combination and at a large number of sizes, and then use those
renderings to train an LLM to generate an "archetypal" Times face for
rendering C/A/T-produced documents.  You then unleash it on the world
and wait for the lawsuits to roll in, which should get a person enough
notoriety to land a day job at someplace where the buzzword "AI" excites
hard-charging middle managers.

> I have no slightest idea how much it would cost to hire a professional
> typeface designer to do what I just described, hence I have no idea
> whether or not it is something that the hobbyist community could
> potentially afford, even collectively.  But it is an interesting idea
> to ponder nonetheless - which is where I leave it for now.

Hobbyist font designers do exist.  Some may lurk on one or both of these
lists.  I would ask them if it's more or less a solved problem already.

> > There is a third problem, whose resolution is in progress, when
> > producing PDF output from this document; slanted Greek symbols are
> > present but "not quite right".  This is because unlike PostScript,
> > PDF font repertoires generally don't provide a "slanted symbol"
> > face.
> 
> Can you please elaborate?  I personally hate PDF with a passion, but I
> concede that in order to make my documents readable by people other
> than me, I have to rcp my .ps file from the 4.3BSD machine to a
> semi-modern-ish (Slackware) Linux box and run ps2pdf on the file.

Doug McIlroy still does this.[1]

> But what "slanted symbol" font are you talking about that exists in
> PostScript but not in PDF?  The only PostScript fonts whose existence
> I take as a given (as opposed to downloading the font explicitly) are
> the standard 14: 4 Times family fonts, 4 Helvetica family fonts, 4
> Courier family fonts, Symbol and ZapfDingbats.  Which of these 14 is
> missing in PDF, and how does "standard" ps2pdf (Ghostscript) handle
> it?

Sorry, I elided too much from my response on this point.

I should not have implied that "slanted symbol" is a standard PostScript
font; it is not, per my copy of the _PostScript Language Reference
Manual_ (3e) [see Appendix E].

"Slanted symbol", a.k.a. "SS", is a supplemental face in groff...of old
provenance--it goes back to groff 1.06 (September 1992) at least.  It
exists to solve a problem that can be observed when you compare two
documents already referenced above.

1.  Adobe's _PostScript Language Reference Manual_, p. 794.  Table E.13,
    "Symbol Encoding Vector"
2.  CSTR #54 "Nroff/Troff User's Manual" (1976), p. 226*.  Table I,
    "Font Style Examples"

* using the page numbering in the HRW reprint of Volume 2 recently
  discussed on TUHS

You will quickly observe that the C/A/T's "Special Mathematical Font",
bearing the pellucid name "S" in the Ossanna/Thompson naming convention
popular at Bell Labs, renders all its lowercase Greek letters in italic
form.  PostScript's Symbol font does not.

A problem for any post-C/A/T typesetting is how to get upright versions
of lowercase Greek letters.  AT&T troff was engineered around the
assumption that the lowercase Greek letters typically used for
mathematical and scientific typesetting are slanted/italic rather than
upright.  This assumption is baked into the semantics of special
character names *a, *b, *g, and so forth.  (Except when using nroff, of
course, where one "naturally" expects upright glyphs instead, just like
the good old Greek box on the Teletype Model 37.)  The eqn preprocessor
furthermore--and consequently--assumes it doesn't need to do anything
special for these special characters to show up in italics (making its
rendering to terminals inconsistent with troff output).

If you couldn't guess, I plan to change this in groff.  It won't break
eqn documents because what I "take away" in the semantics of the special
characters (an implied font style, which doesn't belong there), I will
"put back" via updated eqn character definitions, so people who say

  sin ( 2 theta ) ~ = ~ 2 ~ sin theta cos theta

will continue to get what they expect.  eqn users who bust down to *roff
special characters to get Greek will, unfortunately, need to adapt.  But
GNU eqn has features to support doing so with minimal pain.[2]

I have read that modern standards of mathematical typography mandate
that constants, like every non-mathematician's favorite, π, should be
set upright, not italicized as people of my generation (and I guess
older ones) are accustomed to seeing it.  The idea is that only
_variables_ get italics.  But I cannot speak further to this point, as
it's well out of my wheelhouse.  If it's true, I hope the increased
flexibility I plan for groff and its eqn will make life easier for those
who typeset math.

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?64231
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?64232

gropdf(1) has not to date supported a slanted symbol font.  But it needs
to for the reasons explored on the groff list last June in a lengthy
thread, the relevant portion of which starts here.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-06/msg00088.html

> I also wanted my troff to run under 4.3BSD, using only K&R C, which I
> reason would probably be impossible with groff.  (I recall reading
> somewhere that groff is written in C++ - so it is completely out of
> consideration for something that needs to run under 4.3BSD.)

Probably, unless someone wants to resurrect cfront...

C is not my favorite programming language, and C++ even less so.  In a
better universe, by my lights, James Clark would have written groff in
Ada.  I acknowledge that a lot of people would characterize such a
universe as a variety of Hell.

> My software is written BY a pirate (me) FOR other pirates.  If you are
> not a pirate, my sw is not for you.

Arrrrrr.  I believe I take your meaning.  Piracy is an occupational
hazard of rentierism.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-08/msg00028.html
[2] See eqn(1), subsection "Spacing and typeface".

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Right.  Nowadays we call these (and other measurements besides width)
> the "font metrics".

Not just "nowadays": font metrics has always been the standard term,
including original troff days.  But I specifically said "spacing widths"
because it is the _only_ metric that matters for the purpose of pleasing
otroff and keeping all line and page breaks where they were originally.

All other metrics matter not in the "pleasing otroff" category, but in
the category of "visual beauty" or "recreating exact appearance", which
would be next-level-up from simply satisfying otroff.

> You will quickly observe that the C/A/T's "Special Mathematical Font",
> bearing the pellucid name "S" in the Ossanna/Thompson naming convention
> popular at Bell Labs, renders all its lowercase Greek letters in italic
> form.  PostScript's Symbol font does not.

Yes, this difference exists.  However, let me point out that *both*
official troff-to-PS toolchains that existed in traditional UNIX world
(Adobe TranScript is one and Bell Labs DWB is the other) took the path
of accepting non-slanted Greek letters as-is from Symbol.  Seeing that
Bell Labs themselves deemed this change as acceptable tells me that
the slanted nature of lowercase Greek letters in original typesetter
fonts (C/A/T, APS-5) was not considered an absolutely essential feature
of these characters that MUST be preserved in every new troff
implementation.

> "Slanted symbol", a.k.a. "SS", is a supplemental face in groff...of old
> provenance--it goes back to groff 1.06 (September 1992) at least.

OK, fair enough: your lineage made a different choice in this regard.
But seeing that both Adobe TranScript and Bell Labs' own later troff
took the same approach as I took in my troff (using Symbol as-is), I
don't feel guilty about not doing the same SS manipulation you do in
groff.

There is also a historical/timeline factor for me: A.D. 2010 was the
first time I laid my eyes on the output of a traditional pre-PostScript
troff typesetter (that was when I scored a physical copy of 4.3BSD
books), and by that point I had been using my own troff for 6 y since
2004.  Yes, I wrote it blindly at first: because of my younger age, I
didn't get to live through the era of traditional typesetters, I
totally missed it, but I needed a working troff under my then-production
OS (4.3BSD) - so what was I supposed to do?...

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Al Kossow]

Tracing the origins of the typefaces used on the GSI/Wang typesetter is a fun rathole
going back to Singer Graphic Systems and to Singer-Friden (ie Flexowriter) before that

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, January 9th, 2024 at 8:27 AM, Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:


> Tracing the origins of the typefaces used on the GSI/Wang typesetter is a fun rathole
> going back to Singer Graphic Systems and to Singer-Friden (ie Flexowriter) before that
> 

On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the thing?  Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using their new, expensive instrument?  Did they have any "packaged bundles" for users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?

Similarly, were any vendor-or-locally-provided solutions used prior to the maturation of troff to the point it was used for the Fourth Edition manual typesetting?  Or was the C/A/T from day one of "production" use being driven pretty much exclusively by troff?  I admit my knowledge of this stuff is fuzzy, such as whether troff+C/A/T was the plan from the outset of acquiring the C/A/T or if there was ever a time where folks at research may have been cooking on a different approach to using the thing.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Phil Budne]

Matt G wrote:
> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't
> exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to
> actually using the thing? ...  or say one of the DEC OSs?

Off-topic for this list, BUT:

At DEC/LCG (Large (36-bit) Computer Group) in the 80's when we got a
DEC LN01 (Xerox 2700 engine?) someone adapted an old typesetter
version of RUNOFF to drive it.  I heard tell that there was a dusty
C/A/T in one of the labs.

Mentions of Typeset-8, Typeset-10, and Typeset-11:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/typeset-10/Typeset-10_Product_Proposal_197310.pdf

Typeset-8:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp8/typeset8/
https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/item/at-the-turn-of-a-key/

  Digital Equipment Corporation’s TYPESET-8 pioneered the “turnkey”
  computer system, where a system was custom designed for a specific
  application and was ready to perform that application at the press
  of a button (or the turn of a key). The TYPESET-8 hardware and
  software package originally sold with the classic PDP-8 as its CPU
  and functioned as a computerized typesetting system. Digital
  Equipment Corporation joined Hewlett-Packard in 2002.

Typeset-11:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/typeset-11/

TMS-11 is pretty sophisticated: RSX-11D with options a real disk
(RP03) or RK05, and a swap device (RF11/RS11), OCR input, VT20 (VT05 +
11/05-- first I've heard of it) but still with up to four paper tape
readers/punches.

The diagram at
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/typeset-11/EK-T11SY-OP-001_TMS-11_System_Managers_and_Usrs_Guide_Feb1975.pdf
shows direct hardware connection to a "photocomp machine", or via punched tape.

But, I haven't spotted any mention of specific typesetter hardware.

https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT20 says:
The DEC VT20 terminal is a variant of the DEC VT05 terminal with special facilities for typesetting.

The VT20/B is another variant with a different enclosure.

  Two VT20/B terminals were connected to single PDP-11/05 (a variant
  of the 11/10) which was connected via RS232 to a host system, either
  a larger PDP-11 or a DECsystem-10, running Typeset-11 or
  Typeset-10. Newspapers using Typeset-10 were The Kansas City Star,
  the Chicago Tribune, and the London, Ontario, Free Press. The
  PDP-11/05 was booted by toggling in the bootstrap using the switches
  on the front of the machine, then downloading the abs loader and
  actual software through the RS232 interface from the host. The
  PDP-11/05 buffered text (news stories) downloaded from the host and
  allowed editing on the VT20. On Typeset-11 it was page oriented, a
  page would be downloaded, edited, then uploaded back to the host. On
  Typeset-10 the text was downloaded, but an associated memory system
  mirrored changes made on the text in the -11 to a copy on the
  -10. When the "save" button was pressed, the text was copied from
  associative memory into the actual text file on the
  DECsystem-10. This allowed for virtual scrolling through large files
  without having to save and load pages. The VT20s were eventually
  replaced by the VT72s, which featured a micro PDP-11 internally,
  with twice the memory of the old PDP-11/05s that controlled the
  VT20s. Interestingly enough, Digital no longer supported the
  associative memory version of the editing software, requiring page
  level editing. The Kansas City Star rewrote the PDP-11 software for
  the VT20s to run on the VT72, allowing for further virtual scrolling
  of large files, and making saving edits faster. The VT72 was
  replaced by the VT172, virtually the same terminal but in a VT100

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

On 1/9/24 12:05 PM, Phil Budne wrote:
> Two VT20/B terminals were connected to single PDP-11/05 (a variant 
> of the 11/10) which was connected via RS232 to a host system, 
> either a larger PDP-11 or a DECsystem-10, running Typeset-11 or 
> Typeset-10.

Does that mean that the PDP-11/05 was functioning similarly to -- what I 
believe is called -- a terminal controller in IBM SNA parlance?

The booting (2nd stage) from the host over the serial connection thereto 
really seems familiar.  }:-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Al Kossow]

On 1/9/24 9:18 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:

> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the thing? 
Short answer is you bought their proprietary typesetting turnkey systems

They had to reverse-engineer the phototypesetter hardware to work with any homegrown software to drive it.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Al Kossow]

On 1/9/24 12:29 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
> On 1/9/24 9:18 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> 
>> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually 
>> using the thing? 
> Short answer is you bought their proprietary typesetting turnkey systems
> 
> They had to reverse-engineer the phototypesetter hardware to work with any homegrown software to drive it.
> 

and that is a very deep rathole I've gone down before with Compugraphic typesetters

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Clem Cole]

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Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF

On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:19 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and
> one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the
> thing?  Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end
> user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of
> example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using
> their new, expensive instrument?  Did they have any "packaged bundles" for
> users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?
>
Basically, the phototypesetter part was turnkey with a built-in
minicomputer with a paper tape unit, later a micro and a floppy disk as a
cost reduction.   The preparation for the typesetter was often done
independently, but often the vendor offered some system to prepare the PPT
or Floppy.  Different typesetter vendors targeted different parts of the
market, from small local independent newspapers (such as the one my sister
and her husband owned and ran in North Andover MA for many years), to
systems that Globe or the Times might.  Similarly, books and magazines
might have different systems (IIRC the APS-5 was originally targeted for
large book publishers).  This was all referred to as the 'pre-press'
industry and there were lots of players in different parts.

Large firms that produced documentation, such as DEC, AT&T *et al*., and
even some universities, might own their own gear, or they might send it out
to be set.

The software varied greatly, depending on the target customer.   For
instance, by the early 80s,  the Boston Globe's input system was still
terrible - even though the computers had gotten better.  I had a couple of
friends working there, and they used to b*tch about it.  But big newspapers
(and I expect many other large publishers) were often heavy union shops on
the back end (layout and presses), so the editors just wanted to set strips
of "column wide" text as the layout was manual.  I've forgotten the name of
the vendor of the typesetter they used, but it was one of the larger firms
-- IIRC, it had a DG Nova in it.    My sister used CompuGraphic Gear, which
was based on 8085's.  She had two custom editing stations and the
typesetter itself (it sucked).  The whole system was under $35K in
late-1970s money - but targeted to small newspapers like hers. In the
mid-1908s, I got her a Masscomp at a reduced price and put 6 Wyse-75
terminals on it, so she could have her folks edit their stories with vi,
run spell, and some of the other UNIX tools.  I then reverse-engineered the
floppy enough to split out the format she wanted for her stories -- she
used a manual layout scheme.  She still has to use the custom stuff for
headlines and some other parts, but it was a load faster and more parallel
(for instance, we wrote an awk script to generate the School Lunch menus,
which they published each week).

ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi John,

At 2024-01-18T00:43:41+1100, John Gardner wrote:
> I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface
> authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive
> scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work.

If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all
of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me
know and I'll send it along.  I won't vouch for its high quality but it
should be comprehensive with respect to coverage.

> Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working
> with the latest release of SimH,

Let me know in private mail where you got stuck.  Maybe I can help.

> I'm still up for this, assuming you've not already started.

No, I haven't--perhaps because I am an Ada fanboy, the prospect of
coding in pre-standard C and its mission to turn anything that can be
lexically analyzed into _some_ sequence of machine instructions has not
stoked my excitement.

(Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my
fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do
for you would overwhelm the task at hand.  Too bad Unix V7 didn't have
Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.)

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Brad Spencer]

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:

[snip]

> (Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my
> fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do
> for you would overwhelm the task at hand.  Too bad Unix V7 didn't have
> Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.)
>
> Regards,
> Branden


I may be very much misremembering this, but I think that Perl 3 might
exist for V7.  I have very vague memories of bring up V7 in SimH and
noted that a perl binary existed there.... but it might have been 2.x
BSD...(this is actually the most likely) or something else in SimH.  All
of the history says Perl 1 was created in late 1987, so V7 certainly
would have been around and I wouldn't be suprised that someone attempted
to port it.  I could not find which OS Perl was an initial target for
and I didn't want to grovel though the old Usenet posts.





-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Clem Cole]

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Larry wrote it for admin help of his 4.1 BSD vaxen at NASA.   (Which was
PCC based compiler K&R1 syntax).  I  do not remember if any one tried to
get it running on the 11 because of address space issues.  As Brad says you
can check all usenet files.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 9:33 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org> wrote:

> "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:
>
> [snip]
>
> > (Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my
> > fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do
> > for you would overwhelm the task at hand.  Too bad Unix V7 didn't have
> > Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.)
> >
> > Regards,
> > Branden
>
>
> I may be very much misremembering this, but I think that Perl 3 might
> exist for V7.  I have very vague memories of bring up V7 in SimH and
> noted that a perl binary existed there.... but it might have been 2.x
> BSD...(this is actually the most likely) or something else in SimH.  All
> of the history says Perl 1 was created in late 1987, so V7 certainly
> would have been around and I wouldn't be suprised that someone attempted
> to port it.  I could not find which OS Perl was an initial target for
> and I didn't want to grovel though the old Usenet posts.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
>

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Rich Salz]

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https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=614089 posted February 1988

Perl Kit, Version 1.0, Copyright (c) 1987, Larry Wall

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

John Gardner wrote:

> I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface
> authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive
> scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work.

Are you offering to donate your labor in terms of typeface design, or
will it be a type of deal where the community will need to collectively
pitch in money to cover the cost of you doing it professionally?

In either case, the "C/A/T-printed document" of most value to this
project would be the same one G. Branden Robinson is referring to:

> If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all
> of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me
> know and I'll send it along.  I won't vouch for its high quality but it
> should be comprehensive with respect to coverage.

The paper in question is Nroff/Troff User's Manual by Joseph F. Ossanna,
dated 1976-10-11, which was indeed also CSTR #54.  The document is 33
pages long in its original form, and page 31 out of the 33 is the most
interesting one for the purpose of font recreation: it is the page that
exhibits all 4 fonts of 102 characters each.  Here are the few published
scans I am aware of:

1) Page 245 of:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_January_1979_Volume_2A_SRI_Reprint_June_1980.pdf

2) Page 235 of:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_Vol_2_1983.pdf

3) Page 239 of:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Edition_Seven_Volume_2A_197901.pdf

4) Page 499 of:

https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd

Question to Branden: the scan you are referring to as "my scan", how
does it compare to the 4 I just linked above?  If your scan has better
quality than all 4 versions I linked above, can you please make it
public?

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi again John,

> I only meant "professional" insofar as aptitude with graphics is concerned.
> I won't accept money; I'm offering my labour out of love for typography,
> computer history and its preservation, and of course, the technology that
> got Unix the funding it needed to revolutionise computing. In any case,
> there's no actual "design" work involved: it's literally just tracing
> existing shapes to recreate an existing design. I do stuff like this
> <https://github.com/file-icons/icons#why-request-an-icon-cant-i-submit-a-pr>
> for *fun*, for crying out loud.

Sounds great!  If you are indeed serious about trying to recreate the
ancient C/A/T character set in PostScript fonts (or some other font
format that can be converted into a form that can be downloaded into a
genuine PostScript printer), I'll try to find some time to produce the
following:

1) A set of C/A/T binary files corresponding to that CSTR #54 manual,
as well as BWK's troff tutorial which usually follows right after in
book compilations.  This step is simply a matter of running the original
troff executable (with -t option) on the original source files for
these docs - but since I actually run an OS that still includes that
original version of troff and you said you don't, it would probably be
easier for me to produce and publish these files.

2) A converter tool from C/A/T binary codes to PostScript, using
whatever fonts you give it.  I'll test it initially using the set of
fonts which I developed for my 4.3BSD-Quasijarus pstroff - all
characters will be there, all positioning will come from original
troff, but it won't look pretty because most PS native font characters
don't match those of C/A/T.  Then as you progress with your font
drawing project, you should be able to substitute your fonts instead
of mine, and see how the output improves.

> Nice! The more material I have, the merrier. As for the scan that Branden
> and I were referring to, I've uploaded a copy to Dropbox

Using pdfimages utility with -list option, I compared the image format
and resolution in various scans I described in my previous mail, plus
this new one you just shared, and concluded that the best quality is
contained in these two:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_January_1979_Volume_2A_SRI_Reprint_June_1980.pdf

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Edition_Seven_Volume_2A_197901.pdf

Here are extracted PNG images of just the relevant page from both PDFs:

https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-sri.png
https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-ucb.png

Each PNG is a lossless extract from the corresponding PDF, made with
pdfimages utility.  Each image is described as being 600x600 DPI in
PDF metadata, and the print is said to be in 12 point - numbers for
converting from pixels to .001m units in font reconstruction...

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi Mychaela,

At 2024-01-17T23:00:14-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_January_1979_Volume_2A_SRI_Reprint_June_1980.pdf
> 
> 2) Page 235 of:
> 
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_Vol_2_1983.pdf
> 
> 3) Page 239 of:
> 
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Edition_Seven_Volume_2A_197901.pdf
> 
> 4) Page 499 of:
> 
> https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd
> 
> Question to Branden: the scan you are referring to as "my scan", how
> does it compare to the 4 I just linked above?

By "my scan", I meant "the copy of the scan I happen to have handy",
rather than one I'd done myself.  What I had handy was the same as your
#2, above.

> If your scan has better quality than all 4 versions I linked above,
> can you please make it public?

Sorry to disappoint.  Thanks for all these links, though!  More people
should familiarize themselves with Volume 2 of the Seventh Edition
Manual, and I hope they will.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi Lennart,

At 2024-01-18T15:45:55+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> Quoth John Gardner:
> > Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working with
> > the latest release of SimH, so that's kind of stalled my ability to develop
> > something in K&R-friendly  C.
> 
> I went ahead and write a little C/A/T-to-later-troff-output converter in
> v7-friendly and C89-conforming C:
> 
> https://git.sr.ht/~humm/catdit

This is an exciting prospect but I can't actually see anything there.

I get an error.

"401 Unauthorized

You don't have the necessary permissions to access this page. Index"

> I’m not confident in having got the details of spacing right (Is that
> 55-unit offset when switching font sizes correct?)

I've never heard of this C/A/T feature/wart before.  Huh.

> and the character codes emitted are still those of the C/A/T,
> resulting in the wrong glyphs being used.

The codes should probably be remapped by default, with a command-line
option to restore the original ones.  I would of course recommend
writing out 'C' commands with groff special character names.

> I created the attached document like this:
> 
> 	v7$ troff -t /usr/man/man0/title >title.cat
> 	host$ catdit <title.cat | dpost -F. -Tcat >title.ps
> 
> (Where do the two blank pages at the end come from?)

Good question; we may need to rouse a C/A/T expert.

> PS: Branden, for rougher results, if you happen to have a Tektronix
> 4014 at hand (like the one emulated by XTerm), you can use that to
> look at v7 troff’s output.  Tell your SIMH to pass control bytes
> through and run troff -t | tc.

I'd love to, just please make your repo available to the public.  :)

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Will Senn]

On 1/5/24 21:22, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2024-01-05T19:02:48-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
>> What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
>> book?
> The HRW copies I have are perfect bound.  But I can't remember if they
> were 3-hole punched as well.
I'm a little slow on the uptake here, so if this has been answered later 
in the thread, apologies.

The version I have, is the HRW, 1983, Revised and Expanded set.
Volume 1: 0-03-061742-1
Volume 2: 0-03-061743-X

It's perfect bound, 3 hole punched, with perforated pages. Volume 1 is 
missing an ld manpage (not missing as in ripped out, missing as in not 
printed or indexed in the book, so far as I can tell.

The ISBN Al's got is the same one I have for vol 1, but for volume two, 
he lists 0-03-061742-X, whereas mine is 0-03-061743-X, I looked at his 
scan and it looks just like my copies, but mine have the ISBN's printed 
on the back cover in a little white box, with black letter. Also, his 
doesn't appear to have the holes punched.

Here are some pics

Front covers:
https://ibb.co/zVdw3Ws

Back covers:
https://ibb.co/0Y1Lmqf

Will

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Al Kossow]

I just checked the catalog and we have a couple of different sets of V7 manuals at CHM
I've never bothered to scan them because of the existence of the pdf repros.

The 4.1BSD set would probably be something good to scan.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Al Kossow]

On 1/6/24 8:52 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
> I just checked the catalog and we have a couple of different sets of V7 manuals at CHM

I also just ordered a copy of the 1983 Vol 1 to compliment the Vol 2 I had already done.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-01-06T08:52:48-0600, Will Senn wrote:
> The ISBN Al's got is the same one I have for vol 1, but for volume
> two, he lists 0-03-061742-X, whereas mine is 0-03-061743-X,

This sounds like a misprint; the last element of an ISBN is a check
digit, so any change to a single earlier numeral should also change the
check digit (where in old ISBNs--"ISBN-10"--before the invariant "978-"
prefix of ISBN-13, "X" counted as a numeral).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#ISBN-10_check_digit_calculation

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[tuhs]

No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
the software side were -

1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
   not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one of his
   books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that if you
   wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
   yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.

2) Scribe. From Brian Reid, of Carnegie-Mellon
   See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/scribe.pdf

-Brian

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com wrtoe:
> Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF
>
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Diomidis Spinellis]

Knuth opens his TeXbook, explaining TeX's origin and pronunciation.

“English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with 
the letters τεχ…; and this same Greek word means art as well as 
technology.  Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.”

He then indeed introduces blecchhh, but he doesn't connect it with the 
absence of quality.

“Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’ so that 
TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh.”

(I couldn't help noticing that in my 1989 edition of the book, ellipsis 
after τεχ appears to be set as three periods ‘...’ rather than a real 
ellipsis ‘…’.  The (modern) Greek words for art  and technology are 
τέχνη (techni) and τεχνολογία (technologia), respectively.

Diomidis

On 10-Jan-24 20:50, tuhs@cuzuco.com wrote:
 > No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
 > the software side were -
 >
 > 1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
 >     not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one 
of his
 >     books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that 
if you
 >     wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
 >     yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[segaloco via TUHS]

Just to swing this back around to V7 docs, this auction has been on eBay for a little bit now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134767543042

After the link is an auction for the HRW V7 manuals, as well as a second Volume 1, the second edition of the Nemeth administration book, and a Fall '84 software catalog from AT&T.  I might jump on this in a week or so if it is still up, although all I really want is the software catalog.  That to say, if someone else does pick this up, all I'd ask is I would like to purchase the catalog then from you or otherwise see to it that it gets scanned.  Otherwise if I do pick it up, expect a follow up posting offering up the V7 pair, I'd take the other Volume 1 (and Nemeth book) to that uni bookshelf I donated a V7 Volume 2 binder to.  If you get this and disappear the software catalog into a memory hole, your mother is a hamster and father smells of elderberries.

- Matt G.

P.S. For those who don't go looking often but might be interested, these are currently listed on eBay in various places:

- 1 Bell Laboratories UNIX Release 3.0 User's Manual.
- 3 Western Electric UNIX Release 5.0 User's Manuals.
- 1 Western Electric UNIX Release 5.0 Error Message Manual.
- Lots of picture-less auctions (you're selling books, pictures are the least you can do...) of allegedly parts of the HRW UNIX SVR2 5 Volume set.  These are small form with metallic alphabet blocks otherwise resembling the motif on the V7 manuals cover.  Distinct from the black and red binders distributed closer to actual machine purchases.
- The usual gaggle of SVR3 and SVR4 manuals, there's always a rotation of them up so not going to point out specifics.

The Release 5.0 Error Message Manual is particularly interesting in that the cover looks virtually identical to the usual Release 5.0/System V motif but the text says "UNIX Operating System" instead of just "UNIX System" like the Release 5.0 and System V copies I have.  Most literature just says "UNIX System" so I suspect the "Operating" text is on earlier runs of the covers.  Just speculation though, can't say for certain.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Matt,

> Just to swing this back around to V7 docs, this auction has been on eBay
> for a little bit now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134767543042

I just snarfed it.  I am only interested in the V7 book pair; the other
3 books (extra vol1, the Nemeth book and the catalog you are most
interested in) will be going to you, my dear.  Please send me your
mailing/shipping address off-list.

> That to say, if someone else does pick this up, all I'd ask is I would like
> to purchase the catalog then from you or otherwise see to it that it gets
> scanned.

I have neither the setup nor the time to do any scanning, so I'll just
send you the physical book.

> If you get this and disappear the software catalog into a memory hole,
> your mother is a hamster and father smells of elderberries.

I hereby swear before my Goddesses that I shall not disappear that
catalog; if it arrives in my hands from the ebay seller, I shall do
everything in my power to get it to you, dear brother.

Mychaela N. Falconia, HPS

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Sebastien F4GRX]

Hi,

Very interesting trivia, I didnt know, thanks!


Funnily, this scribe document has a joke about hyp-

henation.


Sebastien


Le 10/01/2024 à 19:50, tuhs@cuzuco.com a écrit :
> No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
> the software side were -
>
> 1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
>     not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one of his
>     books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that if you
>     wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
>     yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.
>
> 2) Scribe. From Brian Reid, of Carnegie-Mellon
>     See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/scribe.pdf
>
> -Brian
>
> Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com wrtoe:
>> Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:19b /PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and
>>> one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the
>>> thing?  Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end
>>> user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of
>>> example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using
>>> their new, expensive instrument?  Did they have any "packaged bundles" for
>>> users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?
>>>
>> Basically, the phototypesetter part was turnkey with a built-in
>> minicomputer with a paper tape unit, later a micro and a floppy disk as a
>> cost reduction.   The preparation for the typesetter was often done
>> independently, but often the vendor offered some system to prepare the PPT
>> or Floppy.  Different typesetter vendors targeted different parts of the
>> market, from small local independent newspapers (such as the one my sister
>> and her husband owned and ran in North Andover MA for many years), to
>> systems that Globe or the Times might.  Similarly, books and magazines
>> might have different systems (IIRC the APS-5 was originally targeted for
>> large book publishers).  This was all referred to as the 'pre-press'
>> industry and there were lots of players in different parts.
>>
>> Large firms that produced documentation, such as DEC, AT&T *et al*., and
>> even some universities, might own their own gear, or they might send it out
>> to be set.
>>
>> The software varied greatly, depending on the target customer.   For
>> instance, by the early 80s,  the Boston Globe's input system was still
>> terrible - even though the computers had gotten better.  I had a couple of
>> friends working there, and they used to b*tch about it.  But big newspapers
>> (and I expect many other large publishers) were often heavy union shops on
>> the back end (layout and presses), so the editors just wanted to set strips
>> of "column wide" text as the layout was manual.  I've forgotten the name of
>> the vendor of the typesetter they used, but it was one of the larger firms
>> -- IIRC, it had a DG Nova in it.    My sister used CompuGraphic Gear, which
>> was based on 8085's.  She had two custom editing stations and the
>> typesetter itself (it sucked).  The whole system was under $35K in
>> late-1970s money - but targeted to small newspapers like hers. In the
>> mid-1908s, I got her a Masscomp at a reduced price and put 6 Wyse-75
>> terminals on it, so she could have her folks edit their stories with vi,
>> run spell, and some of the other UNIX tools.  I then reverse-engineered the
>> floppy enough to split out the format she wanted for her stories -- she
>> used a manual layout scheme.  She still has to use the custom stuff for
>> headlines and some other parts, but it was a load faster and more parallel
>> (for instance, we wrote an awk script to generate the School Lunch menus,
>> which they published each week).
>>

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2024, tuhs@cuzuco.com wrote:

> No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on 
> the software side were -

COFF (Computer Old Farts Followers) is the sister list to this one; it was 
set up to take the off-topic posts from TUHS (I suggested the name to 
Warren).

Subscribe in the usual way...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Friday, 12 January 2024 at  9:48:54 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jan 2024, tuhs@cuzuco.com wrote:
>
>> No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
>> the software side were -
>
> COFF (Computer Old Farts Followers) is the sister list to this one; it was
> set up to take the off-topic posts from TUHS (I suggested the name to
> Warren).
>
> Subscribe in the usual way...

In fact, no.  I replied yesterday and first checked the details.
To subscribe, you need to ask Warren personally.

That's not the case for TUHS.  Warren, why the difference?

Greg
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