[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

Mychaela Falconia falcon at freecalypso.org wrote: . . . I was just tryting to use the tool that would give the path of least resistance for that troff source. Even between flavors of UNIX in the 1980s, there were issues getting correctly formatted output bewteen Documenter's Workbench (DWB) and UCB. The DWB way of troff to PostScript is -- $ pic file | tbl | eqn | troff -mm -Tpost | dpost >file.ps $ # if you want to print it near the "bird cage" printer, near a famous stair case in MH $ i10send -dbirdie -lpost file.ps $ # which would eventually call postio for you $ postio -l /dev/tty?? file.ps As this is pre-ethernet time, QMS printers are connected via RS-232 serial lines and postio does the communication to the printer. You can find dpost at https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/p… (or at https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/dpost/dpost.c ) Looking at the last few lines of https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/p… it is signed, Richard Drechsler MH 2F-241 x7442 mhuxa!drexler Which is that group I mentioned. Rich wrote dpost for sure, also if you look at the last person thanked in the Preface of The C programming Language, Second Edition (1988) -- Rich Drechsler helped greatly with typesetting. On a sad side note, Carmela L'Hommedieu, I was going to say "recently," but it's been almost four years now, who also worked in that group, has passed https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/10822663/Carmela-Scrocca-LHommedi… Yes that is the missing C Reference Manual. I was gifted the troff source for it, and unfortunately I do not have that gifted copy anymore. You will need to check on the legality of that. It is missing because it was published as Appendix A of the first edition of The C Programming Language in 1978 by Prentice-Hall, which means they (not Bell Labs, nor successor compaies, AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia) contractually own the rights to it for some period of time. I you read Dennis' old home page at https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ you'll see this verbage -- "The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System''. For completeness, there are also versions of Kernighan's tutorial on C, in Postscript or PDF format. There is also a slightly earlier (January 1974) version of the C manual, in the form of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum, visible here, if you can accommodate 1.9MB. No updated version of this manual was distributed with most machine readable versions of the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time. The tutorial was greatly expanded into the bulk of the book, and the manual became the book's Appendix A. However, it turns out that the paper copies of the 7th Edition manual that we printed locally include not only what became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled "Recent Changes to C", and I retyped this. I haven't been able to track down the contemporary machine-readable version (it's possible that some tapes were produced that included it). This is available in PostScript or PDF format." As we know from the recent public domaining of Mickey Mouse, copyright is retained 70 years past the date of death of the (last surviving) author. So if Brian Kernighan lives to the ripe old age of 101, this work cannot be used without permisson until 2113, unless the rights holders place it into the public domian before hand. Since the 1st edition is out of print, it's rights *may* have reverted back, but to which companies? Probabaly Nokia and AT&T jointy. But there is no way to know if you can use it, without an official notice of such. -Brian