Re: [TUHS] Origins and life of the pg pager

On Jun 14, 2020, at 4:37 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote: Eric Shienbrood at Berkeley wrote "more" around 1979, and it was the standard BSD pager. It was inspired by the --More-- option in the ITS terminal driver at MIT. "pg" did not come from Berkeley. My recollection is that it came from AT&T in response to requests to include "more", which was in exptools at Bell Labs but not in any standard AT&T system. "pg" is not in my UNIX 5.0 manual, but it's in my SVID with the comment "New in System V Release 2". UNIX 5.0 was the AT&T internal pre-release of System V. SVID was the System V Interface Definition from AT&T. Mary Ann On 6/14/20 3:52 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you have > an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well? > > Thanks, Warren > > ----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi(a)malbolge.net> ----- > > Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200 > From: Michael Siegel <msi(a)malbolge.net> > To: wkt(a)tuhs.org > Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager > > Hi there, > > I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated. > > The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the > System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the > historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1] > > I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux > package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging > utility.”[2] > > I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it > into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of > the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004 > Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get > the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely > available. > > Any ideas on how to proceed? > > > Best > Michael > > > [1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)) > but I've also found other sites stating the same. > > [2] > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-ut… > > [3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html > > ----- End forwarded message -----