Steffen Nurpmeso writes:
> Note that heirloom doctools (on github) is a SysV-derived *roff
Wow, thanks for mentioning this. I was unaware of it. When I
recently wrote that it would be nice to add TeX's 2D formatting
to troff I didn't realize that it had already been done.
Something new to play with.
Jon
On the subject of documtation of [nt]roff, no one seems to have
mentioned Narain Gehani's two editions of ``Document Formatting and
Typesetting on the UNIX System'' (700+ pages), and a second two-author
volume that covers grap, mv, ms, and troff. There is a table of
contents of the second edition recorded here:
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1987:DFT
There is an entry in that file for the first edition too
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1986:DF
The second volume, co-authored with Steven Lally, is covered here:
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1988:DFT
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Today I was looking around for more v7 stuff of interest that I might
find on the web and came across a tape image in the ATT bits directory:
http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/ATT/ labeled X7252.2015_UNIX_V7.tap and an
image of the reel with original and added markings. I downloaded it and
sure enough, it's a bootable v7. I then compared it with my recreated
tape image from the files in the Keith Bostic folder on tuhs. The 11.7MB
tapes are nearly identical, with only a handful of bytes that differ at
the very end of the tape:
ATT tape:
54532000Â Â Â 000000Â 000000Â 024000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000 000077Â 000000
54532020Â Â Â 052135Â 014020Â 010000Â 034113Â 056720Â 023524 072143Â 122062
54532040Â Â Â 141401Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000 000000Â 000000
54532060Â Â Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000 000000Â 000000
54532100Â Â Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000 000000Â 037400
54532120Â Â Â 000000 000000
54532123
Bostic recreated tape:
54532000Â Â Â 000000Â 000000Â 024000Â 000000Â 000000Â 000000 177777Â 177777
54532020
I'm wondering - 1) Does anyone know the provenance of the
X7252.2015_UNIX_V7.tap 2) Do the bytes at the end of the tapes look
familiar or particularly meaningful? My knowledge of 40+ y.o. tape
formats is woefully lacking, but I'm curious.
Will

On Jan 10, 2022, at 12:33 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> TeX looks better but you instantly know it is
> TeX, it has a particular look.
Perhaps you’re thinking of documents using Computer Modern fonts,
typeset using LaTeX’s document classes. Check out the examples here:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typograp…
Hello All.
I am pleased to announce that, after a multi-year effort, Chris Ramming's
awkcc is now once again available for download, and this time with
a more permissive license.
I would like to thank Brian Kernighan, Chris Ramming and Doug McIlroy
for contributing letters of support to my efforts to get this program
re-released.
The lion's share of the thanks must go to Martin Carroll of Nokia
Bell Labs, who fought the uphill battle within Bell Labs to get permission
to release the code, and who uploaded it to GitHub.
Me? I pushed here and there, and contributed the actual code snapshots;
it seems that Bell Labs had misplaced the code in the meantime. :-)
The code, both the 1988 and 2011 versions, may be found at
https://github.com/nokia/awkcc.
The code is primarily of historical interest; I think it would take
a significant effort to build it on a more modern system, although I
think it could be done. It'd also be an effort to bring it up to date
with the current Unix version of awk. Again most likely doable, but not
necessarily trivial.
In any case, enjoy!
Arnold
Hello,
I’m looking for photographs of university computer labs from 1985 until 1995, particularly labs full of unix workstations, of course. Does anyone here have photos like that in their collection?
I’m also thinking of reaching out to university archivists, but I don’t have any direct connections to any.
Thanks much!
- Alex
I have a copy of a spiral-bound booklet with yellow covers called "The C
Programmer's Reference" by Morris I. Bolsky of the Systems Training
Center, AT&T Bell Laboratories, (C) 1985. A curious little snapshot of
1980s pre-ANSI C.
I posted a picture of the front cover (with table of contents) at
https://twitter.com/fanf/status/1475407500946157570
I think I rescued it from the office clear-out in 2013 when Cambridge
University Computing Service moved out of the old city-centre offices. I
probably picked it up from a stack of old books that were to be chucked;
wherever I found it, I can't remember who it belonged to. And now I no
longer work for the University, it has come home with me.
Tony.
--
f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> https://dotat.at/
Southwest Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger: Southerly or
southeasterly, backing easterly or northeasterly later, 4 to 6,
becoming variable 3 for a time in Cromarty and Forth. Moderate,
occasionally rough at first in southwest Forties, Cromarty and Dogger.
Rain or showers, fog patches developing. Moderate or good,
occasionally very poor.
> It would be nice to hear about the rationale from a primary source.
Assembly language was deemed a last resort, especially as portability
was coming to the fore. As I wrote in A Research Unix Reader,
"Assembly language and magic constants gradually declined from the
status of the 'real truth' (v4) to utterly forgotten (v8)." In v7,
assembler usage was demoted to the bottom of syscall man pages. It
could also be found in /usr/src/libc/sys/*.s
Doug
Well, hallelujah, after much travail (I've tried this every Christmas
for at least 5 years now), I have succeeded in building vi on v7 from
2bsd. Had to patch the c compiler to enlarge the symbol table, tweak
some stuff here and there, but it finally built and installed without
any errors, yay.
Now, I just want it to do some editing, preferably in visual mode. I can
call it as ex or vi:
# ex
:
or
# vi
:
and q will exit, yay, again!
I have at least two problems:
1. It's not going "full" screen, even with TERM=vt100 or TERM=ansi set
(not that I was surprised, but it'd be nice)...
2. If I type a for append and type something, there's no way to get back
to the : prompt (ESC doesn't seem to work).
3. I'd like manpages (figure they might help with the above), but
they're on the tape as .u files?
I'm hoping this triggers some, oh yeah I remember that, type responses.
Thanks,
Will
So,
in v6, it was possible to use the mesg function from the system library
with:
ed hello.s
/ hello world using external mesg routine
.globl mesg
mov sp,r5
jsr r5,mesg; <Hello, World!\n\0>; .even
sys exit
as hello.sld -s a.out -l
a.out
Hello, World!
This was because v6 included mesg in the library, in v7, it doesn't look
like mesg is included, so doing the same thing as above requires that
code to write the message out be included and in addition system call
names are not predefined, so exit and write have to be looked up in
/usr/include/sys.s, resulting in the v7 equivalent file:
ed hello2.s
/ hello world using internal mesg routine
       mov    sp,r5
       jsr    r5,mesg; <Hello, World!\n\0>; .even
       sys    1
mesg:
       mov    r0,-(sp)
       mov    r5,r0
       mov    r5,0f
1:
       tstb   (r5)+
       bne    1b
       sub    r5,r0
       com    r0
       mov    r0,0f+2
       mov    $1,r0
       sys    0; 9f
.data
9:
       sys    4; 0:..; ..
.text
       inc    r5
       bic    $1,r5
       mov    (sp)+,r0
       rts    r5
as hello2.s
a.out
Hello, World!
My questions are:
1. Is mesg or an equivalent available in v7?
2. If not, what was the v7 way of putting strings out?
3. Why aren't the system call names defined?
4. What was the v7 way of naming system calls?
Will
