No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
the software side were -
1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one of his
books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that if you
wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.
2) Scribe. From Brian Reid, of Carnegie-Mellon
See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/scribe.pdf
-Brian
Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com wrtoe:
> Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF
>
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:19b/PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and
> > one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the
> > thing? Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end
> > user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of
> > example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using
> > their new, expensive instrument? Did they have any "packaged bundles" for
> > users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?
> >
> Basically, the phototypesetter part was turnkey with a built-in
> minicomputer with a paper tape unit, later a micro and a floppy disk as a
> cost reduction. The preparation for the typesetter was often done
> independently, but often the vendor offered some system to prepare the PPT
> or Floppy. Different typesetter vendors targeted different parts of the
> market, from small local independent newspapers (such as the one my sister
> and her husband owned and ran in North Andover MA for many years), to
> systems that Globe or the Times might. Similarly, books and magazines
> might have different systems (IIRC the APS-5 was originally targeted for
> large book publishers). This was all referred to as the 'pre-press'
> industry and there were lots of players in different parts.
>
> Large firms that produced documentation, such as DEC, AT&T *et al*., and
> even some universities, might own their own gear, or they might send it out
> to be set.
>
> The software varied greatly, depending on the target customer. For
> instance, by the early 80s, the Boston Globe's input system was still
> terrible - even though the computers had gotten better. I had a couple of
> friends working there, and they used to b*tch about it. But big newspapers
> (and I expect many other large publishers) were often heavy union shops on
> the back end (layout and presses), so the editors just wanted to set strips
> of "column wide" text as the layout was manual. I've forgotten the name of
> the vendor of the typesetter they used, but it was one of the larger firms
> -- IIRC, it had a DG Nova in it. My sister used CompuGraphic Gear, which
> was based on 8085's. She had two custom editing stations and the
> typesetter itself (it sucked). The whole system was under $35K in
> late-1970s money - but targeted to small newspapers like hers. In the
> mid-1908s, I got her a Masscomp at a reduced price and put 6 Wyse-75
> terminals on it, so she could have her folks edit their stories with vi,
> run spell, and some of the other UNIX tools. I then reverse-engineered the
> floppy enough to split out the format she wanted for her stories -- she
> used a manual layout scheme. She still has to use the custom stuff for
> headlines and some other parts, but it was a load faster and more parallel
> (for instance, we wrote an awk script to generate the School Lunch menus,
> which they published each week).
>
Hi All.
V10 had a program called "monk" which was a "document compiler".
It produced troff and know how to run eqn, tbl, and pic and I'm
guessing also refer. It seems to have been inspired by Scribe.
The V10 files from Dan Cross have the device independent troff output
for the paper that describes monk.
G. Branden Robinson was kind enough to turn it into PostScript for me;
his story is below, forwarded by permission. I'm also attaching
the PostScript file.
I'm curious, did this see a lot of use inside Research or outside of it?
At first glance, it looks like the kind of thing that might have
caught on, especially for people who weren't already used to troff.
Thanks,
Arnold
> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 12:25:53 -0600
> From: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com>
> To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com>
> Subject: Re: v10 ditroff output file
>
> Hi Arnold,
>
> At 2024-01-09T08:50:28+0200, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > Hi.
> >
> > The file of interest is attached. It's from vol2/monk in Dan Cross's
> > V10 sources in the Distributions/Research directory from TUHS.
> >
> > If you can get postscript out of it somehow,
>
> Bad news and good news.
>
> ...unfortunately there was too much impedance mismatch with groff/grops.
>
> Some font names differ but that's not a big deal. (Also, today I
> learned: the troff that generated this reloaded all the fonts at each
> new page.) The troff(1) that generated this also attempted vertical
> motion before starting the first page. That also wasn't a big deal. I
> thought I was going to be able to text-edit my way to a solution...but
> then...
>
> grops really wants the device resolution to be 72,000 dpi, not 720, and
> we'd have to write a rescaling feature to support that. Just editing
> the output file won't do because the file uses Kernighan's optimized,
> anonymous output command pervasively.
>
> groff_out(5):
> ddc Move right dd (exactly two decimal digits) basic units u,
> then print glyph with single‐letter name c.
>
> In groff, arbitrary syntactical space around and within this
> command is allowed to be added. Only when a preceding
> command on the same line ends with an argument of variable
> length a separating space is obligatory. In classical
> troff, large clusters of these and other commands were used,
> mostly without spaces; this made such output almost
> unreadable.
>
> So all these two-digit motions would need to become five-digit motions
> or all the glyphs would pile up on each other. (And that's exactly what
> I happened after doing a couple of fixups and throwing gxditview(1) at
> it.)
>
> Out of curiosity, I tried DWB 3.3 troff.
>
> It did well, until the fourth page, when it fell over and produced
> PostScript that made Ghostscript very angry.
>
> So I tried Heirloom Doctools troff.
>
> 20 pages of goodness.
>
> But be advised: some sort of extension was used to embed other
> PostScript files:
>
> ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/tailor.ps (line 1493) (page 2)
> ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/memo.ps (line 1749) (page 3)
> ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/tmbody.ps (line 2151) (page 4)
> ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/tmcs.ps (line 2694) (page 5)
>
> So I went to minnie.tuhs.org to see if they were there...
>
> ...and they were.
>
> So here you go. Renders without errors (though Heirloom is nowhere near
> as validation-happy as groff), and the output seems plausible.
>
> > I'll really appreciate it. :-)
>
> Enjoy!
>
> Regards,
> Branden
> The <C>omputerphile Youtube channel did a video about 10 years ago about
> "The Great 202 jailbreak:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w
It may be superfluous in this forum, but one should note that the video's
characterization of Brian Kernighan as the father of typesetting at Bell
Labs does great disservice to Joe Ossanna, who single-handedly
brought the first phototypesetter to the labs, subjected it to computer
control, and wrote troff (which lives on 50 years later) to drive it.
In passing, the video denigrates the C/A/T because it had a fixed font
repertoire and no general graphic capability. But without the antecedent
of C/A/T and troff, the famous Linotron summer-vacation project would
never have been undertaken.
Doug
SunRPC, among other protocols, needs transaction IDs (XIDs) to distinguish
RPCs.For SunRPC, it's important that XIDs not be reused (not for all
protocols; 9p has no such requirement). Stateless protocols like NFS and
reused XIDs can get messy.
There is a vague, 30 year old memory, I have, that at some point SPARC got
a time register, or some other register, that always provided a different
answer each time it was read, even if read back to back, in part to enable
creation of non-reused XIDs. Note that things like the TSC or RISC-V MTIME
register make no such guarantee.
I am pretty sure someone here can fill me in, or tell me I'm wrong, about
my SPARC memory.
thanks
Mychaela Falconia falcon at freecalypso.org wrote:
.
.
.
> > It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl,
> > eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU
> > ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from
> > them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to
> > troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979).
>
> You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much more
> "right" than anything from GNU.
I was just tryting to use the tool that would give the path of least
resistance for that troff source. Even between flavors of UNIX
in the 1980s, there were issues getting correctly formatted output
bewteen Documenter's Workbench (DWB) and UCB.
> > That code to produce PostScript
> > outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by
> > Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department
> > 45268).
>
> So it is a different ditroff-to-PS chain than psdit from Adobe
> Transcript? I am not too familiar with the latter, as I ended up
> writing my own troff (derived from V7 version, just published) that
> emits PS directly, but it is my understanding that Back In The Day
> most people used psdit for this type of workflow.
The DWB way of troff to PostScript is --
$ pic file | tbl | eqn | troff -mm -Tpost | dpost >file.ps
$ # if you want to print it near the "bird cage" printer, near a famous stair case in MH
$ i10send -dbirdie -lpost file.ps
$ # which would eventually call postio for you
$ postio -l /dev/tty?? file.ps
As this is pre-ethernet time, QMS printers are connected via RS-232
serial lines and postio does the communication to the printer.
You can find dpost at https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/p…
(or at https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/dpost/dpost.c )
Looking at the last few lines of https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/p… it is signed,
Richard Drechsler
MH 2F-241 x7442
mhuxa!drexler
Which is that group I mentioned. Rich wrote dpost for sure, also if you
look at the last person thanked in the Preface of The C programming
Language, Second Edition (1988) --
Rich Drechsler helped greatly with typesetting.
On a sad side note, Carmela L'Hommedieu, I was going to say "recently," but
it's been almost four years now, who also worked in that group, has passed
https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/10822663/Carmela-Scrocca-LHommedi…
>
> > I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th Edition C Reference
> > Manual
> > in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is
> > the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could
> > provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I
> > was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it.
>
> Ouch, until you pointed it out in this ML post, I hadn't even noticed
> that the C Reference Manual doc is "wrong" in your PDF version! But
> here comes the really important question: if you once had a PDF reprint
> with the "right" version of this doc, where did you get the troff
> source for it? This is the source that was actually censored from the
> V7 tape:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cman
Yes that is the missing C Reference Manual. I was gifted the troff source
for it, and unfortunately I do not have that gifted copy anymore.
>
> I don't have this problem for my 4.3BSD reprint: the source for 4.3BSD
> version of this doc is included on the tape; the corresponding SCCS
> log begins with "document received from AT&T", checked in on 86/05/14,
> and then revised by BSD people into what they wanted printed in their
> version of the manual. But if someone wishes to do a *proper* reprint
> of the V7 manual (or 4.2BSD, where this doc and many others were
> literally unchanged duplications from V7 master at the plate level),
> we need the troff source for the V7 version of this doc.
>
> If this source is totally lost, we as in community can probably do an
> OCR from a surviving scan (for example, the one in 4.2BSD PSD book)
> and then painstakingly produce a new troff source that would format
> into an exact replica - but if there is a leaked copy of the original
> source somewhere, it would certainly make our job way easier.
>
> > Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the PDFs too, in 1999 or
> > 2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them
> > and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but
> > I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not.
> > This work is truly lost.
>
> Aside from the unresolved issue of "cman" document, we as in community
> can produce an even better work if we so wish. I am deferring a more
> detailed discussion until I put out my 4.3BSD PS reprint, so I can
> point to it as a reference for how I like to do things, and maybe by
> then we'll have some clarity on what happened to V7 "cman" troff source.
You will need to check on the legality of that. It is missing because
it was published as Appendix A of the first edition of The C Programming
Language in 1978 by Prentice-Hall, which means they (not Bell Labs, nor
successor compaies, AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia) contractually own the
rights to it for some period of time. I you read Dennis' old home page at
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ you'll see this verbage --
"The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System''. For completeness, there are also versions of Kernighan's tutorial on C, in Postscript or PDF format.
There is also a slightly earlier (January 1974) version of the C manual, in the form of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum, visible here, if you can accommodate 1.9MB.
No updated version of this manual was distributed with most machine readable versions of the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time. The tutorial was greatly expanded into the bulk of the book, and the manual became the book's Appendix A.
However, it turns out that the paper copies of the 7th Edition manual that we printed locally include not only what became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled "Recent Changes to C", and I retyped this. I haven't been able to track down the contemporary machine-readable version (it's possible that some tapes were produced that included it). This is available in PostScript or PDF format."
As we know from the recent public domaining of Mickey Mouse, copyright
is retained 70 years past the date of death of the (last surviving)
author. So if Brian Kernighan lives to the ripe old age of 101, this
work cannot be used without permisson until 2113, unless the rights
holders place it into the public domian before hand. Since the 1st
edition is out of print, it's rights *may* have reverted back,
but to which companies? Probabaly Nokia and AT&T jointy. But there
is no way to know if you can use it, without an official notice of such.
-Brian
Arnold,
Thank you, it's nice to have one's work appreciated. And I know, you were doing exactly what I
was doing, trying to make it more accessible to more people. And Dennis, being who he was, always
gave credit where credit was do. There's nothing else he could or would have done. And like I said,
it was long ago and has not bothered me in a very long time.
Thanks for your continued dedication to gawk. Awk still just flows out of my fingers without even
needing to think much or at all. Professionally, I have programmed in python for years, and have
never gotten to the same level intimacy I have with awk.
-Brian
arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Thanks for this history Brian.
>
> It was a long time ago, but I think all I did was figure out how
> to turn the PDF back into postscript, since I had a postscript printer
> at the time and it was easier for me to print postscript.
>
> I sent the files to Dennis _only_ with the thought that they might be
> useful to other people, and certainly with no intent to steal any credit.
>
> Your files were great; I printed out hardcopy at the time and
> still have them on a shelf in my basement.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Arnold
Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,
After almost 20 y of intermittent development (started in the fall of
2004), I just made the first official release of my version of troff:
https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.Zhttps://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.gz
(The .Z is the native format; the .gz is for greater accessibility.)
The README file inside the tarball gives the full story, but basically
it is my own derivative from classic V7 troff (not derived from
ditroff, and certainly not groff) that runs under 4.3BSD and emits
PostScript. Only PS output is supported, no non-PS targets of ditroff.
I started it in 2004, but I still use it to this day (on a real
MicroVAX running my "organically grown" 4.3BSD variant) to write
various TPS reports and technical manuals etc, for my other projects
that don't have much of anything to do with Ancient UNIX.
For anyone who loves intricacies of troff and/or PostScript, you might
find the source code quite interesting to study. :)
Some Time Soon I am hoping to put out my PostScript reprint of the
first 3 books of the 4.3BSD manual set (namely, URM, USD and PRM books)
made with this troff. The actual book reformatting job is already done
(for these 3 books, not for the other 3 yet), but I need to write new
colophons to be appended (with pstmerge, a tool from my troff suite)
at the end of each book. (The colophons I wrote for URM and PRM back
in 2012 are in need of corrections and updates, and I didn't have the
USD book done in 2012.)
I will also be responding to BSW's detailed account of V7 PDF reprint
in the other thread shortly - but I wanted to get this troff release
out first, so I won't be in a position of saying "please look at my
creation" when that creation is not publicly accessible.
M~
This isn't directly UNIX related, and yes, the thread is 3 years old. But since it made national news last night, probably due to its proximity to Newark Airport. The enormous fire in Elizabeth, NJ, I recognized in the local news as the old Singer factory. That factory was the catalyst that linked me into finding out more on Fred Grampp, and his ancestry.
Here's a non-paywalled link that also mentions it is indeed the old Singer factory: https://newjersey.news12.com/elizabeth-nj-fire-industrial-building
On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 11:12 AM M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
> Serendipitous find! I hadn't realized that Fred had been the third
> generation in the hardware store.
> His father ("Pops") retired to Drayton Island in the St Johns River
> about 60 miles south of Jacksonville.
> Fred often visited him, driving the 19-hour trip in one stint.
>
> Doug
>
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:47 PM Brian Walden <tuhs at cuzuco.com> wrote:
> >
> > Amazing coincidences. A week prior I was researching Topper Toys
> > looking for their old factory ("largest toy factory in the world")
> > As there was litte on it's location and it lead me to find out
> > in 1961 it took over the old Singer Factory in Elizabeth, NJ.
> > So looking up the Singer factory led me to "Elizabeth,
> > New Jersey, Then and Now" by Robert J. Baptista
> >
> > https://ia801304.us.archive.org/11/items/ElizabethNewJerseyThenAndNowSecond…
> >
> > Which had no information on Topper, but had had this paragraph in it's Singer
> > section on page 28 --
> >
> > Boys earned money "rushing the growler" at lunchtime at the Singer plant.
> > German workers lowered their covered beer pails, called growlers, on ropes
> > to the boys waiting below. They earned a nickel by filling them with beer
> > at Grampp's saloon on Trumbull St. One of these boys was Thomas Dunn who
> > later became a long term Mayor. In the early 1920s Frederick Grampp went
> > into the hardware business at the corner of Elizabeth Ave. and Reid St.
> >
> >
> > When I read it I thought funny, as I know the name Fred Grampp. But beleived
> > just a coincidenental same name. After reading the biography post, I went back
> > to the book as it turns out that Fred Grampp is your Fred Grampps's
> > grandfather. You can find more his family and the hardware store and
> > Grampp himself on pages 163-164, and 212.
> >
> > -Brian
> >
>
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....
