[TUHS] Re: v6 Unix Documents

Hi Dan, At 2024-10-17T21:19:38-0500, Dan Plassche wrote: And Volume 2 in Research version 10! Bell Labs Unix published a Volume 2 for only three releases (per McIlroy), and it appears that all have now been recovered. This is a milestone--thank you! I do observe that this web page credits the publisher of the document as "Western Digital Corporation". Shouldn't that be "Western Electric Company"? (Apparently back in 1975, WD was making chips for calculators.) Noteworthy but frustrating here is that at this point, the forerunner of CSTR #54 was still titled simply "NROFF Users' Manual" (PDF pp. 173ff.). References to troff are present, but the typesetting program is not fully documented. Frustrating! Also we have here the (unnumbered) first edition of the eqn User's Guide (PDF pp. 269ff.). I haven't enumerated the language changes in nroff and eqn going from v6 to v7 yet, but for the formatter there seem to be at least a dozen, including numerous deletions. (If I tried to move groff that fast, I'd be dragged before a firing squad by the faculty of a German university!) The biggest nroff change that leaps out at me right now is that in V6 _special character escape sequences did not yet exist_. Given that the C/A/T typesetter had already been in use for years by 1975 (with eqn giving it strenuous exercise from early on), I find this fascinating. Evidence of the close relationship with the Teletype Model 37 is present, with the `\x` and `\y` escape sequences mapping to "ASCII Shift-out" and "ASCII Shift-in", respectively (PDF p. 177). Check out some of these other relics: .xh Extra half-line mode on. .ch -N -M Move trap by _position_, not name. .nc Number character. (From an interpreter writer's perspective, that one's _really_ interesting. I won't spoil its shocking semantics here.) .ar Arabic numbers. .ro Lower case roman numbers. .RO Upper case roman numbers. (The `af` request hadn't been developed yet. The me(7) package at Berkeley, which commenced development in 1978--_before_ Seventh Edition--helped people over the hump in the case of the first two.) .li Accept input lines literally. (That one survived, undocumented, into Seventh Edition.) .np Number parameters set or reset. \? Raw transmission indicator \: Generates ASCII ETX (003) for post processor use \l ASCII Delete I see that the `ad` request did not accept arguments "l" or "b", just "c" and "n". Since "b" and "l" were redundant, my imaginations conjures office arguments over the meaning of the word "adjustment". With the design in such flux, too bad I wasn't there to lobby for the separation of "alignment" and "adjustment". ;-) No worries, I'll be there soon! <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65954> (Fifty years late but moving fast, as Douglas Adams might have said.) You could turn automatic hyphenation on or off, but there was only one hyphenation mode. Any color you want, so long as it's black! :) I'm intensely interested in both of these from a personal perspective. I observe that the TMG and m6 documents appear may have been prepared by vintage 1972 and 1971 nroff, making them worthwhile exhibits on that basis alone (PDF pp. 211ff., 239ff., respectively). I wonder why they were never typeset. Would the document sources have required too much "porting" to troff? One more thing I noticed: in a first glance, it appears Room 127 got their hands on a sans-serif (Helvetica?) roman plate for the C/A/T prior to V5. We see it used in Ritchie's "C Reference Manual" (PDF pp. 31ff.) and Kernighan's "Programming in C — A Tutorial" (PDF pp. 61ff.). But Courier is nowhere in sight. In summary, there is a boatload of information here that is useful to me in understanding Why Things Look The Way They Do. Please keep the groff list apprised of further findings. Fascinating stuff. Good work! Regards, Branden