[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Rudi Blom]

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>Date: Wed, 16 May 2018 10:05:24 -0400
>From: Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
>To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
>Cc: lorinda.cherry at gmail.com
>Subject: Re: [TUHS] PWB - what is the history?
>Message-ID: <201805161405.w4GE5OeJ012025 at coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
<snip>
>They were in WWB (writers workbench) not PWB (programmers workbench).
>WWB was a suite of Unix programs, organized by Nina MacDonald of USG.
>It appeared in various Unix versions, including research v8-v10.
>
>Lorinda Cherry in research wrote most of the basic tools in WWB,
...

I see Ms. Cherry also has a wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry which  has "Cherry raced
rally cars as a hobby".

and the page contains a link to an interesting document which brings
us back to the PWB
 "A Research UNIX Reader:
 Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual,
 1971-1986
 M. Douglas McIlroy"

- uncle rubl

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Doug McIlroy]

> I think you mean 'style' and 'diction'. I thought those came from
research? I 
> remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or 4.2/4.3BSD?

They were in WWB (writers workbench) not PWB (programmers workbench).
WWB was a suite of Unix programs, organized by Nina MacDonald of USG.
It appeared in various Unix versions, including research v8-v10.

Lorinda Cherry in research wrote most of the basic tools in WWB,
most notably style, diction, and the really cool "parts" that
underlay style. William Vesterman at Rutgers suggested style and
diction. Having parts up her sleeve, Lorinda was able to turn them out
almost overnight. Most anyone else would scarcely have known how to
begin to make style.

Just yesterday Lorinda received a Pioneer in Tech award from the National
Center for Women in IT. Parts and eqn, both initiated by her, certainly
justify that honor.

[Parts did a remarkable job of tagging text with parts of speech, without
getting bogged down in the swamp of parsing English. It was largely
implemented in sed--certainly one of the grander programs written in that
language. Style reported statistics like length of words, frequency of
adjectives, and variety of sentence structure. Diction flagged cliches
and other common infelicities. WWB offered advice based on the findings
of these and other text-analysis programs.]

Doug

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > Programmer's Workbench - aka PWB was John Mashey and team in Whippany.
    > They took a V6 system and make some changes

I was suprised to find, reading the article on it in the Unix BSTJ issue, that
the system changes were less than I'd thought. Some of the stuff in the PWB1
release that we have (see previous message) is _not_ described in that article
(which is fairly detailed), which further compounds the lack of clarity over
who/what/when between V6 and V7.

    > Noel may know how it made it to MIT

That I _do_ know! There was some sort of Boy Scouts group at Bell (not sure
exactly where) and one of the members went to MIT. I think he was doing
undergraduate research work in the first group at MIT to have Unix (Steve
Ward's), but anyway he had some connection there; and I think also had a
summer job at Bell. He was the Bell->MIT conduit.

    > PWB 2.0 was released a few years later and was based on the UNIX/TS
    > kernel and some other changes and it was around this time that the UNIX
    > Support Group was formed

??? If PWB1 was in July '77, and PWB2 was some years later, USG couldn't have
been formed 'around [that] time' because there's that USG document from
January '76?

     Noel

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jon Forrest <nobozo at gmail.com>

    > John Mashey had a lot to do with PWB so maybe he can say a few words
    > about it if he's on here.

It would be great to have some inside info about the relationship among the
Research, USG and PWB systems. Clearly there was comunication, and things got
passed around, but we know so little about what was happening during the
period between V6 and V7 when a lot happened (e.g. the changes to C, just
mentioned).

E.g. check out the PWB1 version of exec():

  https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1/sys/sys/os/sys1.c

It's been changed from V6 to copy the arguments into swap space, _not_ buffers
allocated from the system buffer pool (which is how V6 does it). So, who did
this originally - did the PWB people do it, or was it something the research
people did, that PWB picked up?

I used to think it was USG, but there's a 'Unix Program Description' document
prepared by USG, dated January 1976, and it's still clearly using the V6
approach. The PWB1 release was allegedly July, 1977:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1

(Which is, AFAIK, the _only_ set of sources we have for after V6 and before V6
- other than the MIT system, which seems to be basically PWB1.)

So who did the exec() changes, originally?

And I could list a bunch more like this...

    Noel

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Doug McIlroy]

Here's part of the story.

> From: "Doug McIlroy" <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
> To:<tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
> Sent:Fri, 16 Dec 2016 21:09:16 -0500
> Subject:[TUHS] How Unix made it
to the top
>
> It has often been told how the Bell Labs law department became the 
> first non-research department to use Unix, displacing a newly acquired 
> stand-alone word-processing system that fell short of the department's 
> hopes because it couldn't number the lines on patent applications, 
> as USPTO required. When Joe Ossanna heard of this, he told them about 
> nroff and promised to give it line-numbering capability the next day.  
> They tried it and were hooked. Patent secretaries became remote 
> members of the fellowship of the Unix lab. In due time the law
> department got its own machine. 

Come to think of it, they must already have had a machine, probably
leased from the commercial word-processing company, for they had DEC
tapes they needed to convert to Unix format. Several of us in the Unix
lab spent a memorable afternoon decoding the proprietary format. It was
finally broken when we computed a bitwise autocorrelation function. It
had a big peak at seven. The tapes were pure ASCII rather than bytewise
ASCII--a lot of work for very little data compression.

As for training, the secretaries had to learn nroff and ed plus the
usual lot of ls, mkdir, mv, cp, rm. The patent department had to invest
in modems and order phone lines to plug them into. I don't know what
terminals they used.

From this distant point in time it seems that it all happened in a couple
of weeks. Joe Ossanna did most of the teaching, and no doubt supplied
samples to copy. As far as I know the only other instructional materials
would have been man pages and the nroff manual (forbiddingly terse,
though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.

Doug

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:19:50AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
> it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.

And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the
others, I like -ms best).

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 14 May 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:

> And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the 
> others, I like -ms best).

I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still 
preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to 
this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).

I used to joke that the only way that I'll write in -mm is if I was paid 
to do so :-)  And it won't be cheap...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Nemo]

On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
> preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
> this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).

Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I
still
> > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it
to
> > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
>
> Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac

I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came
with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it
was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem cole]

The PWB children used -mm  I seem to remember that the base system 3 and maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.    

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
> > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
> > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> >
> > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> 
> I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 
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[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Larry McVoy]

So what's the back story with PWB?  It seems like sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.  I feel like there 
was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose.  So far
as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
originals.

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> The PWB children used -mm  I seem to remember that the base system 3 and maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.    
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
> > On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
> > > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
> > > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> > >
> > > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> > 
> > I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
> > 
> >         - Dan C.
> > 

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 8:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So what's the back story with PWB?  It seems like sort of a back water
> but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.  I feel like there
> was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
> common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose.  So far
> as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
> they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
> originals.
>

learn was in BSD distributions, though they never made the leap to
{Net,Open,Free}BSD in any useful way because the source material had become
dated by then.

Warner


> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> > The PWB children used -mm  I seem to remember that the base system 3 and
> maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If
> you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
> >
> > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
> quite.
> >
> > > On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason
> I still
> > > > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still
> use it to
> > > > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> > > >
> > > > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> > >
> > > I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that
> came with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which
> it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
> > >
> > >         - Dan C.
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So what's the back story with PWB?  It seems like sort of a back water
> but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.  I feel like there
> was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
> common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose.  So far
> as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
> they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
> originals.
>

I think you mean 'style' and 'diction'. I thought those came from research?
I remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or
4.2/4.3BSD? Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing it with
BSD, but I thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick look shows a
copy in 7th Ed.

        - Dan C.


On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> > The PWB children used -mm  I seem to remember that the base system 3 and
> maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If
> you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
> >
> > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
> quite.
> >
> > > On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason
> I still
> > > > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still
> use it to
> > > > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> > > >
> > > > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> > >
> > > I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that
> came with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which
> it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
> > >
> > >         - Dan C.
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> I think you mean 'style' and 'diction'. I thought those came from research? I
> remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or 4.2/4.3BSD?

IIRC they were written up in the BSTJ "Unix" number.

> Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing it with BSD, but I
> thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick look shows a copy in 7th Ed.

I remmber learn being present on at least one early Xenix release I played 
with.  I've long forgotten the details of which release, though.

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[John P. Linderman]

My recollection of the research/PWB split (I wasn't in either center) was
that research (wisely) decided not to get into the business of software
support or committing to a stable system, so PWB forked off to be a
supported, stable version of UNIX. It was used by many of the computer
centers within the Labs because of the promise of support and stability.
Support included published manuals, with the hand of Ted Dollota (whose
first language wasn't even English) creating some amazingly good documents.
There was some idea exchange between research/and PWB (like the Mashey
shell and the Bourne shell incorporating support for what is now thought of
as "here documents"), but research was focused on innovation and PWB was
focused on support. AT&T management no doubt were looking to an OS on their
(IMHO mostly disastrous) entry into the computer business, for which they
agreed to be broken up.

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 3:48 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:

> I think you mean 'style' and 'diction'. I thought those came from
>> research? I
>> remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or 4.2/4.3BSD?
>>
>
> IIRC they were written up in the BSTJ "Unix" number.
>
> Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing it with BSD, but I
>> thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick look shows a copy in 7th
>> Ed.
>>
>
> I remmber learn being present on at least one early Xenix release I played
> with.  I've long forgotten the details of which release, though.
>
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[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 4:33 PM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl at gmail.com>
wrote:

> AT&T management no doubt were looking to an OS on their (IMHO mostly
> disastrous) entry into the computer business, for which they agreed to be
> broken up.
>
Actually, I think the behavior at the time shows that they wanted to be in
the hardware business -- *e.g. the 3B20​*

*​vs. DEC and IBM's offerings of the day*.  What they failed to understand
was to be in the SW​ business it meant that their customers (IBM, DEC, HP,
Microsoft) needed to succeed in selling >>their own<< hardware by using
AT&T's SW.
ᐧ
ᐧ
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[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

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> Actually, I think the behavior at the time shows that they wanted to be in the
> hardware business -- e.g. the 3B20​

And for that they failed miserably.

I still throw up upon hearing the phrase "3B4000."  What a horrible, 
horrible, piece of hardware.

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Jon Forrest]

On 5/15/2018 7:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> So what's the back story with PWB?  It seems like sort of a back water
> but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.  I feel like there
> was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
> common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose.  So far
> as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
> they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
> originals.

We used PWB at Ford Aerospace in the late 70s. It might have been
the closest to a commercial Unix version there was back then. John 
Mashey had a lot to do with PWB so maybe he can say a few words about
it if he's on here.

It's ironic - back in the late 70s there were almost as many
variations of Unix as there are Linux distributions now. It made the
commercial software vendors crazy because each required separate
development and QA resources, and none of them had enough traction
to be the only version that a vendor would support (like maybe
RedHat now).

Jon Forrest

[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So what's the back story with PWB?  It seems like sort of a back water
> but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.

​Actually PWB (1.0) gave on you of your favorite tools -- SCCS ;-)

V6 was semi-widely distributed to the Academics.  Basically the tier-1 CS
schools all had it, but it was probably few than 50-75 licenses.  It was
also were the first commercial use license was written (originally for Rand
Corp).

Programmer's Workbench - aka PWB was John Mashey and team in Whippany.
 They took a V6 system and make some changes, primarily in how groups
worked and added a bunch of user level tools that made it easier to write
and maintain long term commercial software that was being sent out the Bell
Operating Companies -- IIRC the #5ESS project was a big driver but I'm less
sure of that.

PWB was not officially released to the Universities it was originally only
available inside the Bell System, but because of the commerical use license
AT&T started to rethink.   BTW:  some of the University got it from AT&T
employees that brought it with them.    This was how SCCS made it to UCB
because it was not part of the research editions.   Who brought it, there I
never knew.  Noel may know how it made it to MIT, it came to CMU from Phill
Karn and Ted Kowalski.

PWB 2.0 was released a few years later and was based on the UNIX/TS kernel
and some other changes and it was around this time that the UNIX Support
Group was formed in Summit, where aps, Ted, and Steve Johnson spent time.
  This got even less widely used outside of the Bell System because V7 had
been released which also based on the UNIX/TS kernel.  I believe that this
was released via Summit, but Steve or aps may know more.

With V7 there also came the first commercial binary redistribution license,
and commercial use license was modified for the first time.

​Judge Green broke the Bell System up....​


So, AT&T started to negotiate with 10 commercial firms that had
redistribution licenses and we also customers of Prof Allison at Stanford
who brokered the meetings [I was the technical rep from Tektronix, along
with a lawyer].   I'm not sure I can remember everyone in the room at
Ricki's Hyatt.   But Gates was there from Microsoft (only time I ever met
him), Bill Munson from DEC, I've forgotten the HP and IBM reps, 3Com was
Metcalfe, was SCO and few others.  I can see a picture of the faces in my
mind, I just can not remember the names].  What I remember was Gates saying
'You guys don't get it.  The only thing that matters for SW is Volume' --
they wanted to pay $25 a copy max and DEC/IBM/HP thought $1500-2000 was
just fine, since their average systems cost  was $150K.

So ...  PWB 3.0 came about 2-3 years later and Research was supposed to be
out of the distribution business and the new commercial license was created
from that negotiation.     AT&T is allowed to be in the computer business
and renamed it System III.   But if you look at the printed manual, it had
already been created and calls it PWB 3.0.



​Clem​

PS learn, style and diction were part of 7th edition BTW...

ᐧ
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