A small reflection on the marvels of ancient writing...
Today, I went to the local Unix user group to see what that was like. I
was pleasantly surprised to find it quite rewarding. Learned some new
stuff... and won the door prize, a copy of a book entitled "Introducing
the UNIX System" by Henry McGilton and Rachel Morgan. I accepted the
prize, but said I'd just read it and recycle it for some other deserving
unix-phile. As it turns out, I'm not giving it back, I'll contribute
another Unix book. I thought it was just some intro unix text and
figured I might learn a thing or two and let someone else who needs it
more have it after I read it, but it's a V7 book! I haven't seem many of
those around and so, I started digging into it and do I ever wish I'd
had it when I was first trying to figure stuff out! Great book, never
heard of it, or its authors, but hey, I've only read a few thousand tech
books.
What was really fun, was where I went from there - the authors mentioned
some bit about permuted indexes and the programmer's manual... So, I
went and grabbed my copy off the shelf and lo and behold, my copy either
doesn't have a permuted index or I'm not finding it, I was crushed. But,
while I was digging around the manual, I came across Section 9 - Quick
UNIX Reference! Are you kidding me?!! How many years has it taken me to
gain what knowledge I have? and here, in 20 pages is the most concise
reference manual I've ever seen.
Just the SH, TROFF and NROFF sections are worth the effort of digging up
this 40 year old text.
Anyhow, following on the heels of a recent dive into v7 and Ritchie's
setting up unix v7 documentation, I was yet again reminded of the golden
age of well written technical documents. Oh and I guess my recent
perusal of more modern "heavy weight" texts (heavy by weight, not
content, and many hundreds of pages long) might have made me more
appreciative of concision - I long for the days of 300 page and shorter
technical books :). In case you think I overstate - just got through a
pair of TCL/TK books together clocking in at 1565 pages.
Thank you Henry McGilton, Rachel Morgan, and Dennis Ritchie and Steve
Bourne and other folks of the '70s and '80s for keeping it concise. As a
late to the party unix enthusiast, I greatly value your work and am
really thankful you didn't write like they do now...
Later,
Will
> was there ever any crossover regarding UNIX folks applying their
developments to other non-UNIX AT&T systems
Besides Sandy Fraser's long-term effort to advance digital communication
(as distinct from digital transmission), there was TPC; see TUHS
https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-April/020802.html and other
mentions of TPC in the TUHS archives.
Ken Thompson did considerable handholding for early adopters of Unix for
applications within the Bell System, notably tracking automatic trouble
reports from switching systems and managing the workflow of craftspeople in
a wire center.
Bob Morris's intimate participation in a submarine signal-processing
project that Bell Labs contracted to produce for the US Navy set him on a
career path that led to becoming chief scientist at NSA's National Computer
Security Center.
Gerard Holtzmann collaborated to instill model-checking in switching and
transmission projects.
Andrew Hume spent much time with AT&T's call records.
Lorinda Cherry single-handedly automated the analysis of call centers'
notes on customer contacts, This enabled detection of significant
human-engineering and public-relations problems.
An important part of my role as a department head was to maintain contacts
with development labs so that R and D were mutually aware of each other's
problems and expertise. This encouraged consulting visits, internships, and
occasionally extended collaboration or specific research projects as
recounted above.
Doug
Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning
the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days
and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we
are today.
First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and
early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on
demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe
put too much power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have
that power?
But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal
typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all
recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word
processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area
of ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and
accurate since 1980?
I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to
the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for
TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).
Later,
Will
> Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
markup?
I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming into
prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.
Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when
WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we
weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential
for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering
portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on
terminals and in book form or technical papers as TMs and as journal
articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft Word
clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept
documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for unanticipated
purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt.
Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)
Doug
I'm reading about the Automatic Intercept System as discussed in BSTJ Vol. 53 No. 1 this evening. It is a stored program control call handling system designed to respond to calls with potential forwarding or disconnection messages. Reading through the description of the operating system for AIS got me wondering:
What with the growing experience in the CSRC regarding kernel technologies and systems programming, was there ever any crossover regarding UNIX folks applying their developments to other non-UNIX AT&T systems projects or vice versa, perhaps folks who worked primarily on switching and support software bringing things over to the UNIX development camp? In other words, was there personnel cross-pollination between Bell System UNIX programmers and the folks working on stuff like AIS, ESS switching software, etc.? Or were the aims and implementation of such projects so different that the resources were relatively siloed?
I would imagine some of these projects were at least developed using UNIX given the popularity and demands of PWB. That's just my hunch though, some BSTJs also describe software development and maintenance taking place on S/360 and S/370 machines and various PDPs. Indeed the development process for AIS mentioned above, as of late 1971, involved assembly via S/360 software and then system maintenance and debugging via an attached PDP-9.
- Matt G.
Good day everyone, I just wanted to share that I've put up a bit of info as well as some book covers concerning UNIX standards that were published from the 80s til now:
https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:standards
I did my best to put down a bit of information about the /usr/group, POSIX, SVID, and SUS/Open Group standards, although there's certainly more to each story than what I put down there. Still, hopefully it serves to lay out a bit of the history of the actual standards produced over time.
I'm kicking myself because one of the things I could've produced a picture of but didn't save at the time is the cover of IEEE 1003.2, a copy of this popped up on eBay some time in the past year and for reasons I can't recall I didn't order it, nor did I save the picture from the auction at the time. In any case, if anyone has any published standards that are not visually represented in this article, I'm happy to add any photos or scans you can provide to the page.
Also pardon if the bit on spec 1170/SUS may be shorter than the others. Admittedly even having most of this on the desk in front of me right now, I'm fuzzy on the lines between POSIX, the Single UNIX Specification, the "Open Group Specification", spec 1170, etc. or if these are all names that ultimately just refer to different generations of the same thing. Part of getting this information put down is hoping someone will be along to correct inaccuracies :)
Anywho, that's all for now. Feel free to suggest any corrections or additions!
- Matt G.
FYI, this just got passed by Vint Cerf. Very sad news.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: vinton cerf via Internet-history <internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org>
Date: Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 3:18 PM
Subject: [ih] Mike Karels has died
To: internet-history <internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org>
Mike Karels died on Sunday. I don’t have any details other than:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/BSDCan/permalink/10159552565206372/https://www.gearty-delmore.com/obituaries/michael-mike-karels
Mike was deeply involved in the Berkeley BSD releases as I recall, after he
inherited the TCP/IP implementation for Unix from Bill Joy (am I
remembering that correctly?).
RIP
v
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Today after trying to decipher the online help for vim and neovim, I
decided I'd had enough and I opted for nvi - the bug for bug vi
compatible that I've used for so long on FreeBSD. It handles cursor
keys, these days (my biggest gripe back when, now I'm not so sure it's
an improvement). It's in-app help pages are about 300 lines long, the
docs are just four of the 4.4 docs: An Introduction to Display Editing
with VI, Edit: A tutorial, EX Reference Manual, and VI-EX Reference
Manual - all very well written and understandable. It does everything I
really need it to do without the million and one extensions and
"enhancements" the others offer.
In doing the docs research, I found many, many references to a "/Vi
Quick Reference card"/ in the various manpages and docs. I googled and
googled some more and of course got thousands of hits (really many
thousands), but I can't seem to find the actual card referenced. I'm
pretty sure what I want to find is a scanned image or pdf of the card
for 4.4bsd.
Do y'all happen to know of where I might find the golden quick ref card
for vi from back in the 4.4bsd days or did it even really exist?
Will
I keep Lomuto and Lomuto, "A Unix Primer", Prentice-Hall (1983) on my
shelf, not as a reference, but because I like to savor the presentation.
The Lomutos manage to impart the Unix ethos while maintaining focus on the
title in a friendly style that is nevertheless succinct and accurate.
Doug
