And I've received the documents! This is a pastebin with the rough contents of the
documentation package.
https://pastebin.com/jAqqBXA4
Now for some analysis:
The User's Manual is branded System V but also displays a Western Electric Bell logo.
I've seen Release 5.0 manuals displaying the Bell logo and System V manuals without,
but never a System V with. That implies the publication of the manual had to change a few
times, one to switch from internal Release 5.0 to commercial System V and another time to
remove the Bell logo due to divestiture. I would have to wonder if similar transition can
be seen with different revisions of these documents?
The Release Description manual has a list of System V relevant documents and they all
appear to be accounted for here, so this should represent the wealth of documentation
available to a user of System V Gold in 1983.
Most documents are traceable to documents in the Unix 4.0 collection. I've suffixed
various documents here with the coordinate to the same in the 4.0 collection. Changes of
note:
- The System V documentation includes instructions for 3B20S machines as well as the
instructions for DEC equipment. PDP-11 and VAX guidance have been combined into a single
document.
- The System V documentation adds documents concerning an "Auto Call" feature.
Didn't see this anywhere in 4.0, so should be new circa System V.
- This documentation refers to the last version as System III rather than making any
mention of 4.0. Given that the specific documents mentioning this are System V-branded,
and there are comparable documents that are Release 5.0 branded, this implies there may be
a document floating around out there somewhere equivalent to the Release Description
manual but that actually covers the transition from 4.0 to 5.0.
- The documentation package drops the updated CACM paper, likely because it's
available all sorts of other places.
- The summary and documentation roadmap documents appear to have been synthesized and
combined into the Release Description.
- Snyder and Mashey's shell tutorial was either dropped or combined with
Bourne's shell introduction
- No evidence of an MM foldout like was distributed with 4.0 (and before, there are
sources around implying these foldouts started with the PWB group, may have been printed
as early as 1977)
- Either the original EQN paper is dropped or relevant bits mashed together with the
user's guide
- EFL documentation seems to be dropped, or is merged into one of the other Fortran
documents somewhere down in there. The processor is still in the man pages though.
- ADB documentation seems to be dropped, likewise still in the manuals, listed as DEC
only. Since System V seems to treat DEC as PDP-11+VAX, does this imply there was a VAX
ADB? My understanding is SDB started on 32V and was *the* debugger for VAX.
- Unix Virtual Protocol papers are dropped, they were marked as 3.0 only in the 4.0
manuals anyhow, so probably not relevant.
- The Standalone I/O Library and SASH (Shell) paper is dropped
- None of the internals nor security papers seem to have made it, so no Unix Implemention,
I/O Implementation, PDP and Portable C Compiler Tours, Assembler Manual, PDP-11/23 and
11/34, or Password Security papers.
These will likely be a slower burn than the 4.0 documents since I purchased them myself
and am not in a hurry to get them shipped back to someone. That said, if there's
anything in the above pastebin that particularly piques any interest, I can try to move
those to the top of the stack and get scans done sooner rather than later. I'll also
be doing some analysis between these and the 4.0 docs to try and better determine
authorship of various documents, my hope is to have a pretty clear picture of whos work
went into each manual by the time I'm done with it all.
- Matt G.