Exciting development in the process of finding lost documentation, just sealed this one on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/385266550881?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=abbj5srltbk&sssrc=2047675&ssuid=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

After the link is a (now closed) auction for a Western Electric 3B20S UNIX User's Manual Release 4.1, something I thought I'd never see and wasn't sure actually exited: print manuals for 4.x.

Once received I'll be curious to see what differences are obvious between this and the 3.0 manual, and this should be easy to scan given the comb binding.  What a nice cover too!  I always expected if a 4.x manual of some kind popped up it would feature the falling blocks motif of the two starter package sets of technical reports, but the picture of a 3B20S is nice.  How auspicious given the recent discussion on the 3B series.  I'm particularly curious to see what makes it specifically a 3B20S manual, if that's referring to it only having commands relevant to that one or omitting any commands/info specific to DEC machines.

Either way, exciting times, this is one of those things that I had originally set out to even verify existed when I first started really studying the history of UNIX documentation, so it's vindicating to have found something floating around out there in the wild.  Between this and the 4.0 docs we now should have a much clearer picture of that gulf between III and V.

More to come once I receive it!

- Matt G.