Normally I wouldn't cross the beams like this but a comment thread John
Nagle posted on this HN story is well written and for me was a great read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630457
On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 3:55 PM, Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 1:45 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 11:53 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > After Multics, I ran interference to keep our once-burned higher management from frowning too much on further operating-system research.
> > >
> > > Doug
> >
> > This alone is an all-too-valuable skill that contributes to the cultural success of countless projects. Great ideas can too often die on the vine when the upper echelons have quite different opinions of where time and effort should be placed, and I am glad that in my own career I likewise work with understanding immediate supervisors and business analysts that go to bat for our needs and concerns. The importance of a supportive workplace culture in which work is genuinely valued and defended cannot be understated.
> >
> > - Matt G.
>
> unix was written in c, c was written in b, b was written in tmg,and doug wrote tmg. it is all his fault.
>
>
Ken, your modesty is showing :)
I feel the same way about big things I'm working on in my day job. No matter how much folks try to laud me as our architect, nothing I did would exist without what my supervisor years and years ago handed me to start with before he moved on to greener pastures. Invention will always be a group effort, I'm just so glad this particular group effort (re: UNIX) has and continues to have the impact that it does.
A former manager (and respected colleague) would often say "I'm rubber, you're glue, what you bounce off me sticks to you." and it took me a little bit to appreciate what I thought he meant, but even longer to realize that saying encompassed the good as well.
- Matt G.
P.S. Hey Dave, I Bcc'd you, discussions with folks here often remind me of your good advice and management. Hope you're well, would love to hear from you if you see this!
Just to bring it full circle, after a bit of discussion it looks like what Henry is working with is the initial System V release for PDP-11/70, not some fabled PDP-11 SVR2, so the documentation I linked as well as some material on squoze.net concerning System V in SimH all apply directly. Subject adjusted accordingly.
- Matt G.
On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:55 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 16:51, segaloco <segaloco(a)protonmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:16 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user.
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks!
>>>
>>> -Henry
>>
>> First off I didn't know SVR2 made it to the PDP-11, I thought they cut it off after the initial System V release, is what you have AT&T or some derivative version?
>>
>> Second, this is the setup instructions for DEC processors for the initial release of System V which included the PDP-11/70: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0/04%20Setti…
>>
>> Additionally, here is the Operator's Guide which details bootstrapping the system among other things: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-operators-guide-release-5-0/mode/2up
>>
>> While not SVR2, hopefully the differences are minimal enough that you can use those. Good luck!
>>
>> Also regarding finding more documentation, sadly AT&T stripped out the /usr/doc materials with System V, so these critical pieces of documentation actually can't be found in a typical system distribution, rather, you had to get the paper copies. I'm not aware of any discovery of TROFF sources for any of this stuff past System III, I do have it on my long-term list to eventually synthesize copies of said documents from available scans so they can be more easily diff'd, but my current focus is much, much earlier.
>
> Thank you, this is a wonderful starting point. I often forget that sometimes archive.org will have documentation that is not duplicated in other sources, so this is a welcome reminder. I'll read through all of this and report back.
>
> -Henry
Hello all,
I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get
booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to
proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user.
The root dump boots on a simulated 11/70 with an RP06:
--
sim> boot rp
#0=unixgdtm
UNIX/sysV: unixgdtm
real mem = 3145728 bytes
avail mem = 3068864 bytes
INIT: SINGLE USER MODE
--
I'm mostly a BSD person but I'm familiar enough with some later SysV
systems. That being said, the initialization procedure here is completely
foreign to me. I have cpio files for the entire system and I know in
theory how to extract them, but I'm stuck at the basics of creating /usr,
setting up /etc and the like. I have a fully extracted filesystem from the
cpio files that I can browse but I can't find enough information in the
manpages. I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like
on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of
the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling
in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed.
Thanks!
-Henry
> When Rudd, Doug, Ken, Dennis, *et al* start to develop UNIX
Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of those
who "start[ed] to develop it".
Doug
> From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu>
> Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of
> those who "start[ed] to develop it".
http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/
Dennis wrote that "UNIX is a very conservative system. Only a handful of its
ideas are genuinely new." (And quite right he was, too!) Among the ones that
are new, pipes, although less important now than they used to be, were a major
part of the constellation of things that drove its adoption, early on. And I
can't see how pushing pipes was not "developing UNIX"! I'm afraid you'll just
have to live with it! :-)
Noel
Hi All,
I was wondering, what were the best early sources of information for
regexes and why did folks need to know them to use unix? In my recent
explorations, I have needed to have a better understanding of them, so
I'm digging in... awk's my most recent thing and it's deeply associated
with them, so here we are. I went to the bookshelf to find something
appropriate and as usual, I've traced to primary sources to some extent.
I started with Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl, and I won't
knock it (it's one of the bestsellers in our field), but it's much to
long for my personal taste and it's not quite as systematic as I would
like (the author himself notes that his interests are less technical
than authors preceding him on the subject). So, back to the shelves...
Bourne's, The Unix Environment, and Kernighan & Pike's, The Unix
Programming Evironment both talk about them in the context of grep, ed,
sed, and awk. Going further back, the Unix Programmer's Manual v7 - ed,
grep, sed, awk...
After digging around it seems like folks needed regexes for ed, grep,
sed and awk... and any other utility that leveraged the wonderful nature
of these handy expressions. Fine. Where did folks go learn them? Was
there a particularly good (succinct and accurate) source of information
that folks kept handy? I'm imagining (based on what I've seen) that
someone might cut out the ed discussion or the grep pages of the manual
and tape them to their monitors, but maybe I'm stooopid and they didn't
need no stinkin' memory device for regexes - surely they're intuitive
enough that even a simpleton could pick them up after seeing a few
examples... but if that were really the case, Friedl's book would have
been a flop and it wasn't :). So seriously, if you remember that far
back - what was the definitive source of your regex knowledge and what
were the first motivators for learning them?
Thanks,
Will
I hope everyone's having a lovely tail end of whichever season is gracing your
hemisphere. Had some surprise snow this morning up in the NW corner of the US,
hoping it bodes well for a mild summer.
I'm curious, is anyone aware of any attempts to revise John Lions's UNIX
Commentary for versions beyond the Sixth Edition? Having finished my
disassembly of the classic video game Dragon Quest this past year, I'm now doing
some planning for a similar work and have considered practicing the art a little
by doing some diffing of V6 and V7 and feeling out the process by putting down
some revisions, that way I've got some of the flow and kinks worked out before I
start on my own "Commentary on Dragon Quest" manuscript. I'd hate to double up
on something someone else has already done though, so if V7 for instance has
gotten this treatment, then perhaps focusing on PWB or the CB-UNIX kernel would
minimize the potential rehashing.
Also if anyone has any thoughts, suggestions, etc. from their own experiences
working up very detailed source-level documentation of a large software product,
I'd certainly be interested, as I know this is going to turn into quite the
sprawling undertaking once I really get going, especially if I try and work in
the differences between the Japanese and U.S. releases (of which there are many.)
- Matt G.
> From: Bakul Shah
> Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense.
People on this list seem to forget that there were computers before UNIX.
The _syntax_ of "-f" probably predates any UNIX; Multics used it extensively.
See the "Introduction to Multics", MAC-TR-123, January 1974 (a little after
UNIX V1, but I expect I could probably track it back further in time, if I
cared to put in the effort); pg. 3-24.
Interestingly, I looked though the CTSS manual, and CTSS did not seem to use
this syntax for flag arguments: see, e.g., the SAVE command (section AH.3.03).
The _name_ "flag" came in early on UNIX. (Multics called them "arguments";
see above, pg. 3-27, top line.) We can see this happen - see:
http://squoze.net/UNIX/v1man/man1/du
which calls the "-a" and "-s" "arguments"; but in:
http://squoze.net/UNIX/v1man/man1/ld
"-s", "-u", etc are called "flag arguments".
Long enough ago that certainty about the etymology/rationale is probably now
lost.
Noel
Hello,
A great article on the floppy disk.
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-floppy-disk
--
Boyd Gerber <gerberb(a)zenez.com> 801 849-0213
ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047
> why did AT&T refer to "flags" as "keyletters" in its SysV documentation?
Bureaucracies beget bureaucratese--polysyllabic obfuscation, witness
APPLICATION USAGE in place of BUGS.
One might argue that replacing "flag" by "option", thus doubling the number
of syllables, was a small step in that direction. In fact it was a
deliberate attempt to discard jargon in favor of normal English usage.
Doug
> Al Kossow wrote:
>
> > there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it.
>
> URL?
>
> I've never heard of a surviving copy
Your best start is here: http://www.powertrancortex.com
The UK Powertran Cortex was quite close to the Marinchip M9900 in capabilities and John’s software was ported to it. The website has an emulator and disk images for most of the user land and “MDEX” -- a simple executive that John wrote to bootstrap his software stack. This material survived in the hands of a few Powertran Cortex enthusiasts. They also had disks for NOS/MT (binaries + sysgen), but those were found after that website was made 10+ years ago.
The Powertran Cortex design was also used to build an industrial control computer, the PP95. The UK company behind that did most of the porting work and had a complete M9900 system to do the work on. In 2018 the inventory of that company was found in a garage including that M9900 system. Also more disk images and manuals, including the NOS/MT User Manual. The disks included a few that contained reconstituted (partial) source code for NOS/MT. With a little help from John, I was able to reconstitute the remainder of the source code. All this is not online.
I will contact you off list to see how this can be best preserved.
Paul
Earlier this year two well known computer scientists passed away.
On New Year’s Day it was Niklaus Wirth aged 90. A month later it was John Walker aged 75. Both have some indirect links to Unix.
For Wirth the link is that a few sources claim that Plan 9 and the Go language are in part influenced by the design ideas of Oberon, the language and the OS. Maybe others on this list know more about those influences.
For Walker, the link is via the company that he was running as a side-business before he got underway with AutoCAD: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/
In that business he was selling a 16-bit system for the S-100 bus, based around the TI9900 CPU (which from a programmer perspective is quite similar to a PDP11). For that system he wrote a Unix-like operating system around 1978-1980, called NOS/MT. He had never worked with Unix, but had spelled the BSTJ issues about it. It was fully written in assembler.
The design was rather unique, maybe inspired by Heinz Lycklama’s “Satellite Processor” paper in BSTJ 57-6. It has a central microkernel that handles message exchange, process scheduling and memory management. Each system call is a message. However, the system call message is then passed on to a privileged “fat kernel” process that handles it. The idea was to provide multiprocessor and network transparency: the microkernel could decide to run processes on other boards in the same rack or on remote systems over a network. Also the kernel processes could be remote. Hence its name “Network Operating System / Multitasking” or “NOS/MT”.
The system calls are pretty similar to Unix. The file system is implemented very similar to Unix (with i-nodes etc.), with some notable differences (there are file locking primitives and formatting a disk is a system call). File handles are not shareable, so special treatment for stdin/out/err is hardcoded. Scheduling and memory management are totally different -- unsurprising as in both cases it reflects the underlying hardware.
Just as NOS/MT was getting into a usable state, John decided to pivot to packaged software including a precursor of what would become the AutoCAD package. What was there worked and saw some use in the UK and Denmark in the 1980’s -- there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it. I guess it will remain one of those many “what if” things in computer history.
Just recollecting old memories: why did AT&T refer to "flags" as
"keyletters" in its SysV documentation? Some sort of denial of
Ed5/6/7/BSD's very existence?
The one good they did was the TTY driver...
-- Dave, who used to work for a SysVile shop
All, while I'm reminiscing about Minnie's history, I just noticed that we
have hit 30,000 postings on the combined TUHS/PUPS mailing list.
===
In the spirit of early Unix, does that mean the message number
has wrapped back to low numbers, skipping those occupied by
messages still running, like process IDs?
Norman Wilson
(temporarily thousands of km from)
Toronto ON
On Wed Feb 23 16:33, 1994, I turned on the web service on my machine
"minnie", originally minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au, now minnie.tuhs.org (aka
www.tuhs.org) The web service has been running continuously for thirty
years, except for occasional downtimes and hardware/software upgrades.
I think this makes minnie one of the longest running web services
still in existence :-)
For your enjoyment, I've restored a snapshot of the web site from
around mid-1994. It is visible at https://minnie.tuhs.org/94Web/
Some hyperlinks are broken.
## Web Logs
The web logs show me testing the service locally on Feb 23 1994,
with the first international web fetches on Feb 26:
```
sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:13 1994] GET / HTTP/1.0
sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:18 1994] GET /BSD.html HTTP/1.0
sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:20 1994] GET /Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
...
estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:21 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:30 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:49:46 1994] GET /BSD-info/cdrom.html HTTP/1.0
shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:20 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:24 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:04 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:10 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
```
## Minnie to This Point
Minnie originally started life in May 1991 as an FTP server running KA9Q NOS
on an IBM XT with a 30M RLL disk, see https://minnie.tuhs.org/minannounce.txt
By February 1994 Minnie was running FreeBSD 1.0e on a 386DX25 with 500M
of disk space, 8M of RAM and a 10Base2 network connection. I'd received a copy
of the BSDisc Vol.1 No.1 in December 1993. According to the date on the file
`RELNOTES.FreeBSD` on the CD, FreeBSD 1.0e was released on Oct 28 1993.
## The Web Server
I'd gone to a summer conference in Canberra in mid-February 1994 (see
pg. 29 of https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V15.1.pdf
and https://minnie.tuhs.org/94Web/Canberra-AUUG/cauugs94.html, 10am)
and I'd seen the Mosaic web browser in action. With FreeBSD running on
minnie, it seemed like a good idea to set up a web server on her.
NCSA HTTPd server v1.1 had been released at the end of Jan 1994, see
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q1/0282.html
It was the obvious choice to be the web server on minnie.
## Minnie from Then to Now
You can read more about minnie's history and her hardware/software
evolution here: https://minnie.tuhs.org/minnie.html
I obtained the "tuhs.org" domain in May 2000 and switched minnie's
domain name from "minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au" to "minnie.tuhs.org".
Cheers!
Warren
P.S. I couldn't wait until Friday to post this :-)
To expand on Branden's observation that translating from one member of the
roff family to another is hard, I note that the final output usually
presents a text in a shape that has been fine-tuned for appearance. In
grammatic terms it might best be presented in transformational terms a la
Chomsky: a basic text with a fairly simple grammar tweaked by
pretty-printing transforms.
Translation involves parsing input into an AST according to one grammar and
unparsing to generate output according to another. Chomsky's work uses
transformational grammars primarily for generation. I'm not aware of any
implementation of the inverse: parsing according to a transformational
grammar. Certainly no practical tools exist for doing so.
Unfortunately, one doesn't consciously write roff according to the model I
have outlined. This means that parsing it is more like parsing a natural
language than a strictly defined programming language. So, the absence of
formal tools is exacerbated. Roff scripts, like everyday English, are
written according to an intuitive--and occasionally ad hoc--grammar that
varies both with authors and with time. And seventy years of hard work has
not yet fully automated the parsing of English.
Doug
Doug McIlroy is still around and contributing…
With same insight & wry sense of humour :)
===========
<https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/X5P6FYM…>
> Apologies for posting the above title tonTUHS. It's not the first time that
> I've crossed signals between groff and TUHS, but hey, I've got 10 years on Biden.
>
> Doug
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
Apologies for posting the above title tonTUHS. It's not the first time that
I've crossed signals between groff and TUHS, but hey, I've got 10 years on
Biden.
Doug
Hello everyone, I'm currently laying the groundwork for a restart of my mandiff project, expanding it to encompass not just the manual-proper, but also the documents leading to the "Documents for UNIX" collections as well. Thus far I'm about halfway done on a ROFF restoration of the earliest surviving draft of Dennis Ritchie's The UNIX Time-Sharing System paper[1], reconstructed from existing, later NROFF text and ROFF conventions from the Third Edition manual[2].
Thus far, the additional documents I've found explicitly referenced in the earlier days are:
User's Reference Manual to B - K. Thompson[3]
C Reference Manual - D. M. Ritchie[4 - see note]
M6 Manual - A. D. Hall[5]
ROFF Manual - J. F. Ossanna[6 - see note]
A Manual for the TMG Compiler-writing Language - M. D. McIlroy[7]
UNIX Assembler Manual - D. M. Ritchie[8 - see note]
NROFF Users' Manual - J. F. Ossanna[9 - see note]
YACC Manual - S. C. Johnson[10 - see note]
Aside from these references, there are two other B papers, one a tutorial[11] by B. W. Kernighan and the other a MH-TSS reference by S. C. Johnson[12]. I don't think I saw either referenced in the manual-proper. The latter then makes further reference to a "Bell Laboratories BCPL" by R. H. Canaday and D. M. Ritchie, although I suspect this is lost, I can't find it.
Anywho, my plan is to take any known ROFF/NROFF sources for the above documents and reconstruct the earliest versions possible and then add them to my revamped repository in the timeframes that they first start showing up as references in the manual to derive a more holistic view of the creation of manuals and guides in the early days. A few matters prompted me to start over:
1. Noticing that there is direct lineage between some of the text in the UnixEditionZero paper and later manual pages like as(I), I want to capture the base text as far back as possible, which in this case would mean ensuring a commit in the chain captures the transfer of the text from the UnixEditionZero paper to as(I) to give a more complete history.
2. Al Kossow has now scanned and preserved a UNIX Program Generic II manual, meaning I no longer have to make as many assumptions about what changed and what didn't in the USG/Research split. Thus far, assumptions about the Program Generic line have been based on the extant MERT manual (which in turn is described as deriving from the Program Generic III manual.)
3. The picture of PWB/2.0 is becoming a bit clearer as time goes on, but is still murky, and that has implications for the changes between the Sixth Edition (where my current mandiff repo[13] ends) and the Seventh Edition. Rather than having to go back and redo a bunch of work, I think the first pass can stand on its own as a source of guidance on redoing this.
4. The cleanliness of the repository history is not to my liking, there are several instances of multiple commits across pages related to some larger, holistic change that would really be easier to study if they were in one. Starting over, I now have a much clearer picture of V1->V6 that I can use to produce a tighter history.
Anywho, to summarize what I'm looking for feedback on, first, are there any major documents I'm omitting from this investigation? Any particular technical memoranda that are crucial to the big picture? Additionally, is anyone aware whether USG Program Generic I (or earlier?) had a formal edition of the Programmer's Manual or if they would've just referred folks to the research manual prior to PG II? With the latter question I'm trying to determine if USG manual history starts with the PG II manual Al Kossow has scanned or if I should be considering a hole in the record where a PG I manual goes.
Thanks for following along, hopefully getting this groundwork in place will ensure the next go at this project is even more fruitful than the last!
- Matt G.
--- References ---
1 - https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZ…
2 - https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man
3 - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kbman.html
4 - I may have a copy of the earliest version of this I can identify. The earliest version I can find online is dated January 15th, 1974 (https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cman74.pdf) and contains the text "C is also available on the HIS 6070 computer at Murray Hill and on the IBM System/370 at Holmdel" whereas this particular copy of the paper states "C is also available on the HIS 6070 computer at Murray Hill, using a compiler written by A. Snyder and currently maintained by S. C. Johnson. A compiler for the IBM System/360/370 series is under construction." The manual is TROFF printout and isn't formatted as a memorandum like the link included here. References to the C Reference Manual begin to show up as early as the Second Edition manual, although these imply the C manual is still being written. Does anyone know if the C Reference Manual started in ROFF and then moved to NROFF some time before the earliest copies we're aware of? In any case, I intend to scan this copy, it just hasn't bubbled up in my project list yet.
5 - https://tuhs.pdp-11.org.ru/Documentation/TechReports/Bell_Labs/CSTRs/2.pdf
6 - I have a copy that defers from the one I could find here: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/roff71/roff71.pdf It is not in technical memorandum format and also may be missing a few pages (in mine, the tutorial ends with the "Translation" section but the linked document contains a couple more paragraphs on page offset (.po), merge patterns, and an envoi (conclusion). The most striking difference is that the linked paper is Doug's version for TSS, but the paper I've got lists the invocation in the UNIX style (roff +N -M name1 name2 ...) and is likely representative of the UNIX version with Joe Ossanna's work. Doug if you catch this and believe the attribution on this page (https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=systems:2nd_edition) should have your by-line or both you and jfo, happy to make the edit. The text of the UNIX version I have does seem to descend from your original paper. By the way, an even earlier version of this paper for runoff is available here (https://manpages.bsd.lv/history/runoff69.low.pdf)
7 - https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/1972_stuff/tmg.pdf
8 - This is first referenced in the Third Edition manual. Some of the text may derive from the second Appendix of the "UnixEditionZero" paper linked above, the manpage certainly has influence from that document. Not sure if any of that implies the manual may have started in ROFF, but in any case, constitutes an early reference.
9 - This reference first appears, verifiably, in the Third Edition. However, the Second Edition manual does list nroff(I) in the TOC, but this page is not actually included in the extant PDF in the archive. In any case, the earliest version of the NROFF Users' Manual I'm aware of is the Second Edition, dated 9/11/74. Is any such First Edition extant on the public record?
10 - The earliest reference to this manual I can find is in the Third Edition. Not sure if there are any earlier specimens than the text in the Sixth Edition sources.
11 - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/btut.html
12 - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bref.html
13 - https://gitlab.com/segaloco/mandiff
Accidentally ran into this today.
I’ve never seen this put together and thought it worth adding to the TUHS archives.
Hadn’t realised that both the authors of “Ball & Brown” (1968) were Aussies and UNSW alumni.
Studying a little accounting, this paper was mentioned as ’the most cited’ paper in the field.
The Big New Idea in 1968 was to use computers to analyse stock market data & show correlations.
I hadn’t known either had come back to Australia (QLD or WA then UNSW/AGSM),
then founded AGSM, with a focus on digital analysis of data.
Ian Johnstone, from CSE, went to AGSM to run their computers.
He recommended DEC + Unix and was backed by Brown, the director.
[ Andy Hume was recruited by Ian J, before leaving for a job at Bell Labs in the Computing Research Centre. ]
The AGSM license caused conniptions with the AT&T lawyers.
While AGSM fell into the near free “University & Education” license, they weren’t using Unix just for ‘education’.
AGSM became the first commercial licensee of Unix, or so I was told at the time.
Ian Johnstone was AUUGN editor while at AGSM, before scooting off to the USA and rising to heights there.
While Ball & Brown studied in Faculty of Commerce, they obviously had enough of a grounding
in ‘computing’ and data collection / handling / analysis to set the stage for their 1968 paper.
In 1971, Fortran IV was taught to first year students in Science, using John M Blatt’s (of UNSW) textbook.
It’s not unreasonable that Finance & Accounting had courses or training in Computing 5 years before that.
Within 10 years, they were both back at UNSW, running AGSM, teaching & using Digital research methods,
based solidly on Unix…
cheers
steve
===============
<https://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/editorials/0206edit.html>
Looking back, I realise it must have been a fortuitous convergence for me:
thanks to Philip Brown and Ian Johnstone, the AGSM had been running Unix machines since 1976;
thanks to Bob Wood, I read of Bob Axelrod's work with GAs in examining the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma before it was published
(and Axelrod was also at Michigan);
thanks to my innate curiosity, I had been reading and contributing to the Usenet news groups on the Internet since 1986.
Sydney was not so far from Ann Arbor, finally.
===============
Phillip Brown
<https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/accounting/caip/aahof/ceremonies/philip_brown>
Philip Brown holds an important and unique place within the annals of Australian accounting.
As co-author of the research paper that redefined the course of academic accounting research in the last forty years
he inadvertently set the research agendas and directions for a legion of academics that followed.
Philip started school at Riverstone in western Sydney with a short stint at Summer Hill in his final two years of primary education
proceeding to Canterbury Boys High School where he scored an average pass in his Leaving Certificate.
He then worked as a junior clerk in the accounting department of British Motor Corporation at Zetland.
Advised to seek tertiary qualifications he thought he should enrol for a commerce degree at the University of NSW.
Despite this advice, Philip enrolled as a part-time student in the Faculty of Commerce at University of New South Wales gaining the highest pass in the course.
This level of achievement was maintained throughout his degree leading inevitably to an honours year,
graduating with First Class Honours and taking a University Medal.
After graduation Philip tutored at University of New South Wales,
received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the USA heading to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
He completed his MBA in 1963 finishing top of the class
During this period [2 years after MBS] he met Ray Ball with whom he wrote a seminal paper that defined the course of accounting research for the next forty years.
Rather than pursue a career in the United States, Philip returned to Australia as a Reader in Accounting at the University of Western Australia (July, 1968 – June, 1970).
In 1974, Philip moved to Sydney to help establish the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM).
As inaugural Foundation Director he introduced world-class MBA and MPA (public administration) programs
to develop the skills of Australia's future leaders.
During his AGSM days Philip championed the development of Australian data in financial accounting research.
He saw the need for Australian share price data to be systematically collected and made available to researchers
spending a great deal of time personally collecting data and providing programming support for these databases.
The existence of these databases as a high quality resource for researchers is often taken for granted today
but it was the foresight scholars with foresight like Philip who saw the need and acted accordingly.
===============
Ray Ball
<https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/accounting/caip/aahof/ceremonies/ray-ball>
Raymond John Ball is one of the most influential contemporary accounting scholars,
having held professorial positions in Australia at UNSW and Queensland,
and in the United States at Rochester and Chicago.
With a first-class honours degree and the University Medal from UNSW,
Ray moved to the University of Chicago where he earned an MBA and PhD.
In 1968 Ray Ball co-authored the seminal paper
‘An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers’
that revolutionised financial accounting research.
Drawing on the developing financial economics literature and linking accounting information and share prices in a novel manner,
the paper provided the foundation for modern capital markets-based research.
As the inaugural recipient of the American Accounting Association’s Seminal Contributions to the Accounting Literature Award in 1986
it was observed that
‘no other paper … has played so important a role in the development of accounting research during the past thirty years’.
It remains the most highly cited accounting research paper.
Ray Ball has also had a major influence on accounting education in Australia, h
aving been Professor of Accounting at the University of Queensland (1972-1976),
and foundation professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management (UNSW) (1976-1986),
where he was instrumental in the development of the first US-style PhD program in Accounting and Finance in Australia.
During his time at Queensland and UNSW he was instrumental in developing rigorous empirical research in Australian capital markets,
addressing issues such as the risk/return trade-off, dividend policy and taxation mechanisms.
===============
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,
Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original
printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition? Does such a thing
exist? Given that Brian S. Walden produced and published a PDF reprint
of this manual (presumably done with some "modern" version of troff)
back in 1998, I reason that there probably wasn't much interest in
preserving the original print by painstaking scanning (and the files
from such a scan would have been ginormous by 1998 standards), hence I
am not certain if such a scanned version exists - but I thought I
would ask nonetheless.
I was however very pleased to discover that some very kind soul named
Erica Fischer did scan and upload the complete set of Usenix printed
books for 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD - here is the 4.2BSD version:
https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.2bsdhttps://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsdhttps://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.2bsdhttps://archive.org/details/upm-supplement-4.2bsdhttps://archive.org/details/smm-4.2bsd
and here is 4.3BSD:
https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.3bsdhttps://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.3bsdhttps://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.3bsdhttps://archive.org/details/upm-sup1-4.3bsdhttps://archive.org/details/upm-sup2-4.3bsdhttps://archive.org/details/smm-4.3bsdhttps://archive.org/details/uum-index-4.3bsd
It is my understanding that all supplementary docs (the papers that
were originally in volumes 2a and 2b in the V7 manual) were retroffed
by UCB/Usenix for 4.3BSD edition, but the earlier 4.2BSD Usenix print
seems to be different - it looks like for 4.2BSD they only did a new
troff run for all man pages and for new (Berkeley-added) supplementary
docs, but in the case of docs which originally appeared in V7 vol 2,
it appears that Usenix did some kind of analogue mass reproduction
from a historical V7 master, *without* doing a new troff run on those
docs. *If* this hypothesis is correct, then Erica's uploaded scan of
4.2BSD manuals can serve as a practical substitute for the presumably-
missing scan of the original printing of V7 manual - but I would like
to double-check my hypothesis with others who are presumably more
knowledgeable about this ancient history (some of you actually lived
through that history, unlike me!), hence the reason for this post.
I would appreciate either confirmation or correction of the guesses
and conjectures I expressed above.
M~
Hello TUHS,
I recently have been working on the Plan 9 fs/v6fs and fs/v32fs programs,
another member of the community had noticed bugs within them and I wanted
to verify that the new code is working as expected. I haven't had an issue
verifying v6fs using files from the TUHS archive but v32fs has proved to
be a bit more tricky. After a little bit of work we were able to get the 'file2'
located at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/32V/ to mount and read
files. But given that all the files here are binaries it was a bit hard to make sure
we're getting the correct information. I attempted to cross reference the files I get
against the file2.tar also located within that spot in the archive but I am getting tar
errors when extracting this file, so its not exactly obvious if what I am checking against
is correct.
So I would like to ask if someone here knows exactly what the sha1sums of these files are
supposed to be and/or has another image with known contents I could test against. I will
preface this with the fact that I am not very well versed in old UNIX filesystems so
please let me know if I've missed anything.
Thank you,
Jacob Moody
