[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Douglas McIlroy]

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>> 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.

The Holt Rinehart edition was 3-hole punched. The original V7
(and its predecessors) were prepared for AT&T standard 4-hole binders, but
distributed in Accopress binders that used only 2 of the 4.

4-hole paper was punched 2" and 3 3/8" from top and bottom of 11" paper.
This reduced the stress concentration that makes the isolated end holes in
3-hole paper vulnerable to tearing out. It was a let-down when AT&T
eventually acceded to a sort of loose-leaf Gresham's law and switched to 3
holes.

Doug

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[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?

[Douglas McIlroy]

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> The <C>omputerphile Youtube channel did a video about 10 years ago about
> "The Great 202 jailbreak:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w

It may be superfluous in this forum, but one should note that the video's
characterization of Brian Kernighan as the father of typesetting at Bell
Labs does great disservice to Joe Ossanna, who single-handedly
brought the first phototypesetter to the labs, subjected it to computer
control, and wrote troff (which lives on 50 years later) to drive it.

In  passing, the video denigrates the C/A/T because it had a fixed font
repertoire and no general graphic capability. But without the antecedent
of C/A/T and troff, the famous Linotron summer-vacation project would
never have been undertaken.

Doug

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[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?

[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?

[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?

[Mychaela Falconia]

Brian Walden <tuhs@cuzuco.com> wrote:

> You will need to check on the legality of that.

I am not the type of person who cares about legalities; on the contrary,
I consider it one of my life goals to break as many laws as possible
before I croak.

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Brian Walden]

Mychaela Falconia falcon at freecalypso.org 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.

I was just tryting to use the tool that would give the path of least
resistance for that troff source. Even between flavors of UNIX
in the 1980s, there were issues getting correctly formatted output
bewteen Documenter's Workbench (DWB) and UCB.

> > 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.

The DWB way of troff to PostScript is --
   $ pic file | tbl | eqn | troff -mm -Tpost | dpost >file.ps
   $ # if you want to print it near the "bird cage" printer, near a famous stair case in MH
   $ i10send -dbirdie -lpost file.ps
   $ # which would eventually call postio for you
   $ postio -l /dev/tty?? file.ps
As this is pre-ethernet time, QMS printers are connected via RS-232
serial lines and postio does the communication to the printer.

You can find dpost at https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/postscript/dpost/dpost.c
(or at https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/dpost/dpost.c )
Looking at the last few lines of https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/postscript/README it is signed,
   Richard Drechsler
   MH 2F-241 x7442
   mhuxa!drexler

Which is that group I mentioned. Rich wrote dpost for sure, also if you
look at the last person thanked in the Preface of The C programming
Language, Second Edition (1988) --
    Rich Drechsler helped greatly with typesetting.

On a sad side note, Carmela L'Hommedieu, I was going to say "recently," but
it's been almost four years now, who also worked in that group, has passed
    https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/10822663/Carmela-Scrocca-LHommedieu

>
> > 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

Yes that is the missing C Reference Manual. I was gifted the troff source
for it, and unfortunately I do not have that gifted copy anymore.

>
> 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.

You will need to check on the legality of that. It is missing because
it was published as Appendix A of the first edition of The C Programming
Language in 1978 by Prentice-Hall, which means they (not Bell Labs, nor
successor compaies, AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia) contractually own the
rights to it for some period of time. I you read Dennis' old home page at
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ you'll see this verbage --

    "The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System''. For completeness, there are also versions of Kernighan's tutorial on C, in Postscript or PDF format.

    There is also a slightly earlier (January 1974) version of the C manual, in the form of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum, visible here, if you can accommodate 1.9MB.

    No updated version of this manual was distributed with most machine readable versions of the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time. The tutorial was greatly expanded into the bulk of the book, and the manual became the book's Appendix A.

    However, it turns out that the paper copies of the 7th Edition manual that we printed locally include not only what became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled "Recent Changes to C", and I retyped this. I haven't been able to track down the contemporary machine-readable version (it's possible that some tapes were produced that included it). This is available in PostScript or PDF format."

As we know from the recent public domaining of Mickey Mouse, copyright
is retained 70 years past the date of death of the (last surviving)
author. So if Brian Kernighan lives to the ripe old age of 101, this
work cannot be used without permisson until 2113, unless the rights
holders place it into the public domian before hand. Since the 1st
edition is out of print, it's rights *may* have reverted back,
but to which companies?  Probabaly Nokia and AT&T jointy. But there
is no way to know if you can use it, without an official notice of such.

-Brian

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

[Brian Walden]

Arnold,

Thank you, it's nice to have one's work appreciated.  And I know, you were doing exactly what I
was doing, trying to make it more accessible to more people. And Dennis, being who he was, always
gave credit where credit was do. There's nothing else he could or would have done. And like I said,
it was long ago and has not bothered me in a very long time.

Thanks for your continued dedication to gawk. Awk still just flows out of my fingers without even
needing to think much or at all. Professionally, I have programmed in python for years, and have
never gotten to the same level intimacy I have with awk.

-Brian

arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 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

[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] 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?

[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?

[Clem Cole]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 9126 bytes --]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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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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?

[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] 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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.