7 Jan
2025
7 Jan
'25
3:22 p.m.
At 2025-01-07T09:42:14-0500, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
The PDP-7 of Unix v0 was a hand-me-down from
Pinson's time in V&A. And
the PDP-11 of v1 was supported by a year-end fund surplus from there.
Hi Doug,
This seems to clarify something I'm a bit murky on in early Unix/nroff
history, because I have read (and repeated, in groff's roff(7), the
claim that revenue from internal AT&T deployments of nroff were a major
aid to getting the CSRC on its feet hardware-wise. But that's in some
tension with the story of Ossanna being able to deliver to the patent
application typists a new line numbering feature in the (n)roff
formatter "by tomorrow" if it was only after nroff's success that these
revenues showed up.
I also seem to remember from the preface to the v3 or v4 manual that the
CSRC was trying to get itself and its Unix users everywhere away from
the PDP-11/20 as fast as possibly, because that model didn't have memory
protection.
I thus have these questions:
What model of PDP-11 was v1 Unix developed and run on at the CSRC?
What model did the CSRC acquire next? Specifically, which one did
(n)roff make possible?
Regards,
Branden