> 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
A few years ago, someone -- and I've forgotten who, forgive me -- kindly gave me a copy of the source code for a UNIX for the AT&T PC6300 called IN/ix, developed by INTERACTIVE Systems. I have found precious little about this system online. Apparently the PC/ix UNIX for the IBM PC XT is fairly well preserved, but I can't find much about IN/ix.
For what it's worth, the login herald in the source code reads:
"IN/ix Office System (c) Copyright INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. 1983, 1988"
Presumably this was PC/ix, but targeting the AT&T 6300? Does anyone have any more knowledge of IN/ix?
If you're interested in digging into it yourself, I've dropped the source here:
https://archives.loomcom.com/pc6300/
(N.B.: All the files inside the zip are compressed, that's just how I got it)
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito * Poulsbo, WA * https://loomcom.com/
> Does anyone here have any source material they can point me to
> documenting the existence of a port of BSD curses to Unix Version 7?
Curses appears in the v8 manual but not v7. Of course a
conclusion that it was not ported to v7 turns on dates. Does
v7 refer to a point in time or an interval that extended until we
undertook to prepare the v8 manual? Obviously curses was
ported during or before that interval. If curses was available
when the v7 manual was prepared, I (who edited both editions)
evidently was unaware of any dependence on it then.
Doug
