I have the following 5 books:

The Unix Operating System Book by Mike Banahan and Andy Rutter (Copyright 1983)
A Unix Primer by Ann Nicols Lomuto & Nico Lomuto (Copyright 1983)
The Unix System by SR Borne (Copyright 1983)
Introducing the Unix System by Henry McGilton and Rachel Morgan (Copyright 1983)
A User Guide to the Unix System by Rebecca Thomas and Jean Yates (Copyright 1982)

The last one is quite interesting because it has a 13 page annotated bibliography. Here's the earlier books:

Information and Publication Division. The UNIX System. An Easier Way to Communicate with Computers." 1979. This has a similar title to an article by SP Morgan in Bell Laboratories Record 56 (1978).  The rest are all clearly articles in journals and magazines back to the original in 75. 

And I have the following on the way that's been mentioned before:
Using the Unix System by Richard Gauthier Command Computer Programming 1981

So there's at least 2 books that pre-date Borne's book, maybe more. There's a second Banahan book that I ordered, but didn't get that claims to be 1982. Trying to get to the bottom of that... All of the above are tutorials to varying degrees, though I've only reviewed the Lomuto and Thomas/Yates books in any detail. None appear to have useful additional historic information.

The McGilton/Morgan book is the oldest one I've seen talk about Berkeley Unix system. The chapter was written in the spring of 1982.

And there's this gem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw that I've seen before here I think, which is dated 1982 and is a film with the same title "he UNIX System. An Easier Way to Communicate with Computers" as one of the items above, so I wonder if that's this film or a paper copy of it. It's clearly Bell Labs related, though.

Warner

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 2:32 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:


On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 9:27 AM Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020 at 16:58, Nemo Nusquam <cym224@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/04/20 11:05, markus schnalke wrote (in part):
> > Thus I now wonder what the first book on Unix, intended for a general
> > readership was.
> Not to be overly pedantic but what would be a "general readership"?

I think the wikipedia article meant Bourne's "The Unix System"  was
the first general introduction to UNIX.

In the autumn of 1984 it was a recommended text book for an
introduction to computing course aimed at first year science
undergraduates at an English university.

They taught us awk programming and basic shell commands on a VAX
running BSD 4.1 using it. I still have a copy.

So by general readership they probably meant primer.

I think it's not the first primer, but it's one of the first. But I'll know more once I process through the half dozen books from the early 80s on Unix that just arrived from ebay... I'll post a brief review and a bibliography


Warner