I have read that one of the first groups in AT&T to use early Unix was
the legal dep't, specifically to use *roff to write patent
applications. Can anyone elaborate on this or supply references?
(This would in great contrast to today, where most applications are
written with certain products despite the USPTO, EPO, and others only
accepting PDF versions.) It would also be interesting to learn how
the writers were taught *roff, what editors were used, and what they
thought. (I recall that the secretaries, as they were then called, in
the math dep't used vi to compose plain TeX documents and xdvi to
proofread them.)
N.
>Date: Wed, 16 May 2018 10:05:24 -0400
>From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
>To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
>Cc: lorinda.cherry(a)gmail.com
>Subject: Re: [TUHS] PWB - what is the history?
>Message-ID: <201805161405.w4GE5OeJ012025(a)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
> 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
> Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?
Indeed. My error.
The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
sense of design.
Doug
> From: Nemo
> I have read that one of the first groups in AT&T to use early Unix was
> the legal dep't, specifically to use *roff to write patent applications.
> Can anyone elaborate on this or supply references?
Are you familiar with the description in Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of
the Unix Time-sharing System":
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.htm
(in the section "The first PDP-11 system")? Not a great deal of detail, but...
> It would also be interesting to learn how the writers were taught *roff,
> what editors were used
I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.
Noel
> 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
> From: Jon Forrest <nobozo(a)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
I never really learned VI. I can stumbled through it in ex mode if I have
to. If there's no EMACS on the UNIX system I'm using, I use ed.
You get real good at regular expressions. Some of my employees were
pretty amazed at how fast I could make code changes with just ed.
Here's part of the story.
> From: "Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
> To:<tuhs(a)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
