On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Ronald Natalie wrote:
The Lions book wasn’t really published back in
the day. It was only
targetted at his students in Australia (though copies leaked out).
Leaked out? Apparently it's the most photocopied book in the world! I
had the originals but sadly lost them in a house move (along with all
issues of AUUGN).
I have one of the Xeroxes. It's a second generation copy. I remember
when I got a hold of someone else's copy me and five of my coworkers split
up and went to different copiers around the company and each made six
copies of their section and then we collated it together. We didn't dare
take it to the company copy center.
The manuals aren’t really a book (and again, they
weren’t really
published as a book) and most of the prose on UNIX was more in the form
of articles than an entire book.
I still reckon that the manpage format is perfect at what it does: telling
Agreed,
but neither the manpages nor the BSTJ articles or the few
non-manpage UNIX documents were "books."