15 Jun
2020
15 Jun
'20
5:37 a.m.
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 -----