[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Douglas McIlroy]

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> I wonder what happened to the amazing library at Murray Hill.

Last I knew, the Bell Labs archives were intact under supervision of a
professional archivist. Formally speaking, the archives and the library
were distinct entities. The library, which was open to self service 24
hours a day, declined rapidly after the bean counters decreed that it
should henceforth support itself on rental fees. Departments immediately
turned to buying books rather than borrowing them. It's very likely that
this was bad for the Labs' bottom line, but the cost (both monetary and
intellectual) was not visible as a budgetary line item.

The 24-hour library contributed to one of Ken's programming feats. Spurred
by a lunchtime remark that it would be nice to have a unit-conversion
program, Ken announced units(1) the next morning. Right from the start, the
program knew more than 200 units, thanks to a book Ken grabbed from the
library in the middle of the night.

Doug

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[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Ed Bradford]

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Who is/was the professional archivist and where is/was the collection last
seen?
Do you have any ideas?

Ed


On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 9:12 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > I wonder what happened to the amazing library at Murray Hill.
>
> Last I knew, the Bell Labs archives were intact under supervision of a
> professional archivist. Formally speaking, the archives and the library
> were distinct entities. The library, which was open to self service 24
> hours a day, declined rapidly after the bean counters decreed that it
> should henceforth support itself on rental fees. Departments immediately
> turned to buying books rather than borrowing them. It's very likely that
> this was bad for the Labs' bottom line, but the cost (both monetary and
> intellectual) was not visible as a budgetary line item.
>
> The 24-hour library contributed to one of Ken's programming feats. Spurred
> by a lunchtime remark that it would be nice to have a unit-conversion
> program, Ken announced units(1) the next morning. Right from the start, the
> program knew more than 200 units, thanks to a book Ken grabbed from the
> library in the middle of the night.
>
> Doug
>


-- 
Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.
  Cicero

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[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Douglas McIlroy]

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The Bell Labs archivist, Ed Eckert, ed.eckert@nokia-bell-labs.com, played a
big role in the Labs' Unix50 celebration in 2019. The archives had not only
documents, but also memorabilia from the Unix Room. I obtained a 1970s TM
from him more recently, probably 2022.

An important organizer of Unix50 was martin.carroll@nokia-bell-labs.com. He
also was the inside lead on the release of post-v7 Unix source.

Doug

On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 9:23 PM Ed Bradford <egbegb2@gmail.com> wrote:

> Who is/was the professional archivist and where is/was the collection last
> seen?
> Do you have any ideas?
>
> Ed
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 9:12 AM Douglas McIlroy <
> douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
>> > I wonder what happened to the amazing library at Murray Hill.
>>
>> Last I knew, the Bell Labs archives were intact under supervision of a
>> professional archivist. Formally speaking, the archives and the library
>> were distinct entities. The library, which was open to self service 24
>> hours a day, declined rapidly after the bean counters decreed that it
>> should henceforth support itself on rental fees. Departments immediately
>> turned to buying books rather than borrowing them. It's very likely that
>> this was bad for the Labs' bottom line, but the cost (both monetary and
>> intellectual) was not visible as a budgetary line item.
>>
>> The 24-hour library contributed to one of Ken's programming feats.
>> Spurred by a lunchtime remark that it would be nice to have a
>> unit-conversion program, Ken announced units(1) the next morning. Right
>> from the start, the program knew more than 200 units, thanks to a book Ken
>> grabbed from the library in the middle of the night.
>>
>> Doug
>>
>
>
> --
> Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.
>   Cicero
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

On 9/28/24 7:38 PM, Warren Toomey via TUHS wrote:

> ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp -----
> 
> I stumbled over this:
> 
> 	https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html
> 
> is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ?

This is an incredible resource as well:

https://www.telecomarchive.com/bstj.html

 From 1922 to 1996.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Douglas McIlroy]

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> That CSTR number 1 is nicely formatted, is that troff?

The archive's CSTR 1 is ersatz. It's a 1973 journal article obtained from
JSTOR. I imagine the manuscript was largely copied from the CSTR, but the
printed paper certainly differs in meta-content and in layout, say nothing
of font. Having gone through the usual route of journal submission and
revision, the body text is probably not word-for-word identical to the CSTR
either.

Doug

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[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
I did know someone, twice, My dad and grandfather. For many years the
family business was typesetting. First they ran a business based on
hotmetal typography. They used the same methods that the Linotype
presented. Eventually Dad switched to photo. He ran two shops, based
on the L202 machine from the same company as the original one. One
year he tells me about having an interesting job, doing the annual
report for AT&T, because the one that the company had there, couldn't
properly grok the ideas behind it, it wasn't until I got into
programming that I figured it out, because the C book was, ah, done
locally and that way.

Ironically the font the company uses for its logo and much of its work
was cut for them, it was called AT&T Gothic.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature was present when the impossible happened 23 years ago, twice."

On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 12:22 AM G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At 2024-09-28T19:20:07-0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > That CSTR number 1 is nicely formatted, is that troff?
>
> troff didn't exist yet in 1971.
>
> That is proper typesetting, though.  I don't know enough to say if it's
> phototypeset or hot lead (can the naked eye reliably tell, if both
> techniques are of high quality?).  We could take the question to the
> real typographers on the groff list.
>
> roff(7):
>      Third Edition Unix also brought the pipe(2) system call, the
>      explosive growth of a componentized system based around it, and a
>      “filter model” that remains perceptible today.  Equally
>      importantly, the Bell Labs site in Murray Hill acquired a Graphic
>      Systems C/A/T phototypesetter, and with it came the necessity of
>      expanding the capabilities of a roff system to cope with a variety
>      of proportionally spaced typefaces at multiple sizes.  Ossanna
>      wrote a parallel implementation of nroff for the C/A/T, dubbing it
>      troff (for “typesetter roff”).  Unfortunately, surviving
>      documentation does not illustrate what requests were implemented at
>      this time for C/A/T support; the troff(1) man page in Fourth
>      Edition Unix (November 1973) does not feature a request list,
>      unlike nroff(1).  Apart from typesetter‐driven features, Unix
>      Version 4 roffs added string definitions (.ds); made the escape
>      character configurable (.ec); and enabled the user to write
>      diagnostics to the standard error stream (.tm).  Around 1974,
>      empowered with multiple type sizes, italics, and a symbol font
>      specially commissioned by Bell Labs from Graphic Systems, Kernighan
>      and Lorinda Cherry implemented eqn for typesetting mathematics.  In
>      the same year, for Fifth Edition Unix, Ossanna combined and
>      reimplemented the two roffs in C, using that language’s
>      preprocessor to generate both from a single source tree.
>
> Regards,
> Branden

[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-09-29T09:38:50+1000, Warren Toomey via TUHS wrote:
> All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link.

Oh, man!  CSTR #44!  "Computer typesetting of technical journals on
UNIX"  Complete with measurements of costs per page, a subject we'd
batted around on the groff list in the past couple of years.  $30 a
page--in the 1970s.  :-O

Great stuff.  Thanks!

Regards,
Branden

"Why, as a pup, l myself fetched thirty thousand dollars on the black
market.  And that was in 1954 dollars." -- Leonard Smalls

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[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Ed Bradford]

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"Look what they've done to my song, ma"

Nokia Bell Labs just doesn't sound right to me and when I visit
the site, well, "Look what they've ....".

I wonder what happened to the amazing library at Murray Hill.

NOkia Bell Labs
https://www.bell-labs.com/about/locations/murray-hill-new-jersey-us/

Thank you for some of the CSTR memories. Do you think the entire
collection is available somewhere or if NBL still has them? Could
we prevail on NBL to release them all to the public?

Ed Bradford (BTL 1976-1983)



On Sat, Sep 28, 2024 at 6:47 PM Warren Toomey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
wrote:

> All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link.
>
> Cheers, Warren
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp -----
>
> I stumbled over this:
>
>         https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html
>
> is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ?
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>


-- 
Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.
  Cicero

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[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-09-28T19:20:07-0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> That CSTR number 1 is nicely formatted, is that troff?

troff didn't exist yet in 1971.

That is proper typesetting, though.  I don't know enough to say if it's
phototypeset or hot lead (can the naked eye reliably tell, if both
techniques are of high quality?).  We could take the question to the
real typographers on the groff list.

roff(7):
     Third Edition Unix also brought the pipe(2) system call, the
     explosive growth of a componentized system based around it, and a
     “filter model” that remains perceptible today.  Equally
     importantly, the Bell Labs site in Murray Hill acquired a Graphic
     Systems C/A/T phototypesetter, and with it came the necessity of
     expanding the capabilities of a roff system to cope with a variety
     of proportionally spaced typefaces at multiple sizes.  Ossanna
     wrote a parallel implementation of nroff for the C/A/T, dubbing it
     troff (for “typesetter roff”).  Unfortunately, surviving
     documentation does not illustrate what requests were implemented at
     this time for C/A/T support; the troff(1) man page in Fourth
     Edition Unix (November 1973) does not feature a request list,
     unlike nroff(1).  Apart from typesetter‐driven features, Unix
     Version 4 roffs added string definitions (.ds); made the escape
     character configurable (.ec); and enabled the user to write
     diagnostics to the standard error stream (.tm).  Around 1974,
     empowered with multiple type sizes, italics, and a symbol font
     specially commissioned by Bell Labs from Graphic Systems, Kernighan
     and Lorinda Cherry implemented eqn for typesetting mathematics.  In
     the same year, for Fifth Edition Unix, Ossanna combined and
     reimplemented the two roffs in C, using that language’s
     preprocessor to generate both from a single source tree.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Larry McVoy]

That CSTR number 1 is nicely formatted, is that troff?

On Sat, Sep 28, 2024 at 07:18:13PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> It might amuse you, or maybe you don't care, but when I was a grad student
> I gave my Pascal students the traveling saleman problem.  I told them how
> hard it was (NP-hard) and said if you can find a solution that works in
> polynomial time, I'll dedicate my life to you to get you a Nobel Prize.
> I was too green to know about Turing awards.
> 
> I had a math guy in the class who called me up, land lines, at 3am on a
> Sunday morning (Saturday night so he was working on this instead of going
> out to have fun).  Screamed at me that he had it.  He didn't.
> 
> Still fun to get the kids thinking.  Seems like Kernighan and Lin thought
> harder.
> 
> On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 11:30:42AM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
> > I didn't realize Kernighan and Lin was CSTR number 1. Cool. That's an
> > important paper.
> > 
> > -rob
> > 
> > 
> > On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 9:38???AM Warren Toomey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link.
> > >
> > > Cheers, Warren
> > >
> > > ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp -----
> > >
> > > I stumbled over this:
> > >
> > >         https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html
> > >
> > > is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ?
> > >
> > > ----- End forwarded message -----
> > >
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Larry McVoy]

It might amuse you, or maybe you don't care, but when I was a grad student
I gave my Pascal students the traveling saleman problem.  I told them how
hard it was (NP-hard) and said if you can find a solution that works in
polynomial time, I'll dedicate my life to you to get you a Nobel Prize.
I was too green to know about Turing awards.

I had a math guy in the class who called me up, land lines, at 3am on a
Sunday morning (Saturday night so he was working on this instead of going
out to have fun).  Screamed at me that he had it.  He didn't.

Still fun to get the kids thinking.  Seems like Kernighan and Lin thought
harder.

On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 11:30:42AM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
> I didn't realize Kernighan and Lin was CSTR number 1. Cool. That's an
> important paper.
> 
> -rob
> 
> 
> On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 9:38???AM Warren Toomey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link.
> >
> > Cheers, Warren
> >
> > ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp -----
> >
> > I stumbled over this:
> >
> >         https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html
> >
> > is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ?
> >
> > ----- End forwarded message -----
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Rob Pike]

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I didn't realize Kernighan and Lin was CSTR number 1. Cool. That's an
important paper.

-rob


On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 9:38 AM Warren Toomey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
wrote:

> All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link.
>
> Cheers, Warren
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp -----
>
> I stumbled over this:
>
>         https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html
>
> is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ?
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>

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