Rather than increase subject drift on a thread I started
"UNIX on (not quite bare) System/370", here's a new thread.
Since the TUHS archive seems to now include documentation,
I decided to take a look and see if the earliest UNIX manual I have
is in the archive:
It was given to me by a friend at Stevens Tech in Hoboken NJ (c. 1980)
who had graduated, and worked for AT&T.
It's hole punched for a four ring binder
(I found an unused Bell System Project Telstar binder to put it in).
The cover page has:
Upper left corner:
Bell Telephone Laboratories Incorperated
PROGRAM APPLICATION INSTRUCTION
Upper right corner:
PA-1C300-01
Section 1
Issue 1, January 1976
AT&TCo SPCS
Center:
UNIX PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL
Program Generic PG-1C300 Issue 2
Published by the UNIX Support Group
January, 1976
The preface starts with:
This document is published as part of the UNIX Operating System Program Generic,
PG-1C300 Issue 2. The development of the Program Generic is the result of the
efforts of the members of the UNIX Support Group, supervised by J.F. Maranzano
and composed of: R. B. Brant, J. Feder, C. D. Perez. T. M. Raleigh, R. E. Swift,
G. C. Vogel and I. A. Winheim.
and ends with
For corrections and comments please contact C. D. Perez, MH 2C-423, Extension
6041.
Not knowing who else I could ask, I brought it to a Boston Usenix (in
the 90's or oughts), and asked DMR if he could identify it. He said
it was an early supported UNIX, and he signed the preface page for me.
The manual has sections I through VIII; all manual pages start with page -1-
I found https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description_ja…
with cover page:
UNIX PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Program Generic PG-1C300 Issue 2
Published by the UNIX Support Group
January 1976
contents:
NUMBER ISSUE TITLE
PD-1C301-01 1 Operating System
PD-1C302-01 1 Device Drivers Section 1
PD-1C303-01 1 Device Drivers Section 2
And consists of descriptions of kernel functions.
So it seems likely that my manual is a companion to that.
I have a Brother printer/scanner, but the paper is fragile, so unless
it's of immediate and burning value to someone, it's unlikely to rise
to the top of my ever-static list of documents to scan....
But if someone has specific questions I can look up, let me know....
The network code in ULTRIX-11 v3.1 dies on me a lot and the scripts to set
it up assume classed subnets still. Would anyone want to work with me to
revamp it? I kind of need a mentor in such things but "used to be" a
decent c programmer. Large ask, I know.
I think the first thing would be to troubleshoot it enough to understand
what's breaking (which I dont know know enough ULTRIX to do myself, but
would probably pick it up quick with the company of an expert), then to
replace the ailing pieces of code. Should be a reasonable scope for
someone here, I bet. Over my head. But I'm happy to do all the
housekeeping / gruntwork / announcing, documenting, etc. and I'm eager to
learn your techniques!
thanks!
jake
P.S. If this belongs not on this list but somewhere like cctalk, please
say so and I'll take it there instead.
I'm finally back to my scan pile and have a few to share:
https://archive.org/details/unix-system-document-processing-guide
First is the UNIX System Document Processing Guide. This is the version of the TROFF et. al. documentation distributed for Release 5.0 as well as the initial release of System V. This contains the expected papers on NROFF/TROFF, MM, Eqn, Tbl, and other bits and pieces like viewgraph macros. These documents appear to be revisions of the various technical memoranda distributed as UNIX papers over time. I think this just leaves the Support Tools Guide as far as unscanned initial System V documents. I have this so just need to get it on my scanner and then the initial System V documentation run should be completely preserved out there on the net.
https://archive.org/details/we-november-december-1981
Second is a copy of WE Magazine from November-December 1981. Distributed to Western Electric employees, this issue of the magazine has a cover story on the installation of the very first central office 5ESS in Seneca, Illinois on July 1st, 1981. The piece goes into some local reactions to installation day, some technical details of 5ESS, and has some nice pictures of the unit being unloaded and moved into place. There are additional articles concerning Nassau Metals, ISSMs, and some goings on around the company.
https://archive.org/details/attached-processor-interface-3b-1a
Finally is the "Attached Processor Interface", a small Western Electric pamphlet detailing an interface for incorporating 3B processors into existing 1A offices such as 4ESS and 1AESS. As with other applications of the 3B to telephony, DMERT features as the operating system, although the pamphlet is mostly concerned with the installation and diagnostic aspects of working with the interface. By the way, the original text is all green, but I scanned all but the covers in B/W.
The last one is interesting in that it's an integration of the 3B into a telephone central office that isn't a 5ESS, rather, you wind up with something more like a 4.5ESS, a 4ESS with a 3B up in it somewhere. However, given the date of November 1981, this postdates the installation of that first 5ESS, making it less likely that this was some embryonic step before the 5ESS and more likely a retrofit designed to get more 3Bs into service in older offices. That this was 1A general was interesting too, that is why a 1AESS could absorb it, meaning there very well could've been frankenstein central offices out there with a 1ESS that got retrofitted with a 1A and then got retrofitted further with an API and a 3B, making one of the monstrosities this pamphlet suggests installing. It's too bad there's a snowball's chance in hell of one of these "API" units popping up out there, much less still mated to its 1A and 3B...but a guy can dream.
Anywho, going to start a slow trickle of scans again now that I've got my office all settled. I'm foraying further and further into telephones so my document hunting these days lands closer to ESS and 1A2 KTS than UNIX, but I'm still keeping an eye out for whatever I can manage to preserve. That all said, that also means my "accepted for scan" circle has gotten larger, as I'm now seeking other 70s-early 80s Bell System stuff generally, not strictly UNIX things, so if you've got some obscure Dimension PBX manual collecting dust I'll happily scan it for ya!
- Matt G.
Hi.
If anyone is interested (*BSD committers, I'm looking at you :-), there have recently
been some updates in the One True Awk (BWK's) which you should pick up. In particular,
regular expression matching performance against Unicode text should now be tolerable.
Feel free to ping me off list if you need more info; let's not spam the list.
Thanks,
Arnold
Damien Wildie:
It is Friday in Australia now
====
Yes, I know that. I was at Caltech, it was one of the
first things they taught us.
I just don't understand why, if Australia had a Thanksgiving
Day, they would choose to have it on the same day as the US.
Does any other country?
On the other hand, if Thanksgiving Day actually mattered to
anyone important, the original ctime(3) would have had a
special table to compute its date, including all the different
a
dates it had in the US before 1942.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON, thankfully
Stuff Received:
> In the U.S., certainly. Do Auzzies celebrate thanksgiving?
Grog:
Not really, but if we did, it would have been yesterday. But we do
get exposed to Black Friday (today).
===
Why yesterday? In Canada we had ours a month and a half ago!
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Hello everyone, I've just recently secured an item that has drawn some questions to mind. The item is a "UNIX System III Programmer's Manual Volume 2A" (image from auction listing: https://i.imgur.com/6blnqz3.jpeg)
The cover is of a typical 70's Bell System motif, branded Western Electric, with blue and yellow lines and a Bell logo. The cover itself appears to be a typical report cover with a window for the title page of the document.
First, I've only seen System III stuff still labeled "Release 3.0." Indeed the manual I have says Release 3.0 on the title page. Also, said manual is Bell Laboratories branded and has the blue and yellow lines near the top, above the cover text but below the Bell Laboratories logotype, an arrangement that can be seen on plenty of Bell Laboratories stuff even into the AT&T period (with the lines being replaced with the blue, red, and black, and death star instead of bell.)
With this set, however, it is specifically labeled "System III". I've heard, anecdotally, that there were User's Manuals that specifically had the text "System III" on the title page, but I've never seen this myself. Are there System III branded manuals or am I misremembering. Additionally, this is labeled specifically Western Electric rather than Bell Labs. Western Electric would continue to be the name on the cover of UNIX documentation (for the most part) after this until divestiture. If such formal "System III" manuals exist, which branding did they happen to get?
Another curious matter is the document is titled "Programmer's Manual...Volume 2A". This nomenclature is more commonly associated with research than stuff descending more from the PWB line like the commercial lineage. For instance, even PWB 1.0 listed its two main documents as "User's Manual" and "Documents for Use With". Research has always called the document the "Programmer's Manual" as far as I know, and the "Documents for Use With" nomenclature was only used with V6, V7 introduced treating the two sets as "Volumes" of the same larger work. What's interesting is in the sources for System III on the archive, in /usr/src/man/docs, the road_map (Documentation Roadmap) specifically uses the text "User's Manual" and "Documents for UNIX", which is still the case by 4.x (albeit the a_man/u_man split seems to have happened right about this time). In any case, I would be curious if anyone knows what was going on with the naming of documentation at this time. Would this imply that there is some variation on the 3.0/SysIII manual out there named "Programmer's Manual" instead of "User's Manual", or perhaps that for some reason when the Sys III variants of these docs had started being published, they had for some reason tried to cut over to the V7 documentation structure only to back out back to "Documents for UNIX" and a "User's Manual" as distinct things by the time of 4.0?
In any case, once this gets here, I'll look it over for anything compelling that might set it apart from the document sources in the UNIX tree. I'm a bit bummed it's only Volume 2A, not both, but it'll be nice to have a physical example of the distributed, published documentation of the time. Maybe a 2B will pop up one of these days.
Thanks for any insights or recollections!
- Matt G.
P.S. Long shot, very long shot, but if anyone on this mailing list has any empty, unused Bell System report covers of the era, Bell Laboratories especially, I would happily buy them from you. I've got my V6 documents and some BSD stuff just in random report covers I fished out of the university recycling, they'd look much nicer in proper covers, but I also recognize the bulk of those covers probably also wound up in some recycling/waste stream decades ago and no longer exist. Once I get this I could use the cover to produce a reasonable facsimile but I feel a tad uneasy regarding "breaking the seal" on that prospect, I don't want to cross the line from improving the aesthetics of my bookshelf to counterfeiting something.
