[TUHS] Re: Bell Foreign-Language UNIX Efforts

Hi, I just got off the phone with my father, who was working at the CII, then Bull, in the eighties through to the early nineties. Here is what I learned: Bull ported UNIX to their own line of Mitra 125: - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitra_15 and later to the SPS-9 which is from what I understand a license-built ridge 32, somewhat comparable to a VAX : - https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1984/11/21/bull-va-fabriquer-en-fra… - http://www.histoireinform.com/Histoire/+infos2/chr5infa.htm - https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/ridge-32-a-bitsliced-early-risc-graphical… These efforts included first a translation of all the manuals from english to french. The translated manuals sometimes still wore the AT&T logo. The strings associated with error codes, and such were also tranlated in the source. This proved insufficient and awkward, and then a real internationalization effort was spearheaded by Bull. Anecdote: the abbrevation i18n for "Internationalization" was coined by Pascal Beyls, his boss at the time. My father was the representative for Bull at X/Open. Internationalization was part of the normalization process. I have on my desk volume 3 of the X/Open portability guide, whose section 3 is entirely dedicated to internationalization. The document is dated december 1988 and therefore predates UTF8 (92 if I'm correct) and even unicode (but I was blowing my first birthday candle at the time so my memory of the events may be a bit fuzzy). The document state that 8 bits are enough for western european languages, and 16 bits should do for asian languages. It promotes the use of ISO-8859-1. It notes that UNIX is limited to 7-bit ASCII and is therefore as is unsuitable for internationalization. It promotes the LANG and LC_* env variables as an annoucement mechanism, and gives examples where the locale is set to french. It also explains the "Message catalogues" with stores "messages [...] separate from the logic of a program, to be translated into several languages, and to be retrieved at run-time according to the language requirements of each user". If you want to dig into a fun part of foreign UNIX history, my father mentions that along with the corresponding Bull hardware, UNIX was sold to the USSR, along with the translated (in russian) manuals. So somewhere in a gas field in siberia may exist a russian UNIX manual with the BULL and AT&T logo. They only had the binaries, not the source of the system. There were a few "homegrown unix-like" efforts in europe, and bull was part of a few of them. BULL then moved to Linux, that's another phone call to make. If you want to dig more into that, the CNAM (a school/museum in Paris, if you are there, come see the museum it is absolutely awesome) is documenting early UNIX history and did a conference a few years back about it. Clem Cole was there and spoke. Here are some links about their efforts: - https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-europe-ent… - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mCSFSF-i1A <- begins with Clem's talk, but the rest is worth watching as well. Hope that helps, Cheers, Edouard. segaloco via TUHS &lt;tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt; writes: