Norman Wilson recalled
> 22. Pike, R. "The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal". _AT&T Bell
> Laboratories Technical Journal 63_, 8 (Oct. 1984).
> Rob described an earlier version of the Blit work in a USENIX talk
> at USENIX in January 1982 (Santa Monica CA). So far as I know it
> was just a talk, no paper, though he showed a canned demo on video
> tape.
By coincidence, one of the two videos made about early Blit
work is newly available in .mpg format: look near the
bottom of Rob Pike's page under Movies:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/index.html
This was just now done by Gerard Holzmann.
Be aware that it is 43MB in size.
This version is spoken by actors, although the script
is Rob's.
The other Blit video is in Betacam format, and we don't
currently have a player for it, so it's not digitized.
I think it's silent, and presumably Rob talked during its
showing. This might be what accompanied the Usenix talk.
(By the way, there are two other, twice-as large
videos there: the Labscam tape, and Rob's appearance
on the David Letterman TV show with Penn and Teller.)
Dennis
If anyone has one of the SCO Ancient Unix licenses and a copy of the
archive that went with it, then they legally have the source to System
III. If such a person extracts sys3.tar.gz and looks in usr/src/man/docs
they'll find a file named `c_man' with the actual manual in it. I quote:
...
.SH "1. INTRODUCTION"
.PP
This manual
.FS
.ps +1
\(dg This manual is reprinted, with minor changes, from
.I "The C Programming Language"
by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie,
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1978.
.ps
.FE
describes the C language
...
What the legalities are of redistributing this, and/or generating
postscript from it, are, I don't know. Similar questions apply
to scanning in the ref man from a copy of K&R-I, which is now
out of print. (I wish Caldera had included System III in their
releasing of Ancient Unix. Sigh.)
I hope this helps, some.
Arnold
P.S. Completely unrelated, but I find it really cool how much of
the System III doc refers to C and Unix on the System/370...
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] C reference manual
> From: norman(a)nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson)
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 09:13:22 -0400
>
> To forestall those who haven't looked: the good news is that
> the papers from Volume 2 of the manual were included in /usr/doc
> on the V7 tape; the bad news is that the C Reference Manual was
> omitted. Here is /usr/doc/cman in its entirety:
>
> Sorry, but for copyright reasons, the source
> for the C Reference Manual is not distributed.
>
> Presumably the problem was that the Reference Manual was published
> as part of the a real book in 1978.
>
> I forget just what Tony was after in the first place, but maybe
> some of the stuff on Dennis Ritchie's home page will help:
> http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/index.html
> In particular the Sixth Edtion version of the C Reference Manual
> is there.
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
The machine which hosts this mailing list is scheduled to be down over the
Australian weekend due to power problems. It should be up on Monday
morning Australian time.
Warren
To forestall those who haven't looked: the good news is that
the papers from Volume 2 of the manual were included in /usr/doc
on the V7 tape; the bad news is that the C Reference Manual was
omitted. Here is /usr/doc/cman in its entirety:
Sorry, but for copyright reasons, the source
for the C Reference Manual is not distributed.
Presumably the problem was that the Reference Manual was published
as part of the a real book in 1978.
I forget just what Tony was after in the first place, but maybe
some of the stuff on Dennis Ritchie's home page will help:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/index.html
In particular the Sixth Edtion version of the C Reference Manual
is there.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
I have an original (in print) of the C reference manual from Unix 6th Ed, as
part of a multipart binder titled "Documents for Use With the Unix
Timesharing System", as well as the "UNIX Programmer's Manual", which is a
print copy of the man pages. I could probably scan the C ref in my copious
spare time, if you're not in a hurry. Warren, do you want to archive stuff
like this? -- Ian
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Finch [mailto:dot@dotat.at]
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 1:10 PM
To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Cc: dot(a)dotat.at
Subject: [TUHS] C reference manual
I'm looking for a copy of the C reference manual from some time between
the 6th Edition (1975) and the first version that came with 4.3BSD
(1986). The stuff in the TUHS archive mostly seems to be missing the
documentation sets, or in the case of the earlier BSDs they are ommitted
for copyright reasons. There are some tutorials dating from about 1979
but they aren't much use.
Any help would be appreciated.
Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
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MODERATE OR GOOD. _______________________________________________
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TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org http://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
Hallo,
Most, if not all, of the V6-docs was distributed with V6 as troff sources.
At
http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/
you'll find postscript versions of these docs.
Have fun,
Wolfgang
This is certainly non-technical UNIX history, which is not to
say it isn't interesting.
I can sharpen up a few details of Dennis's account. Peter was
already a department head when I first visited the Labs in early
1984. I believe his face was already a favourite test image for
various graphics experts, but the cult of the face didn't really
get started until the following year.
In particular I think it was in the summer of 1985 that Tom Duff
thought of the deathstar transform (turning a picture into variable-
width horizontal stripes, as the AT&T logo to a highlighted sphere).
Certainly it was later that year that the much-bigger-than-life
image appeared on the water tower: my calendar file still says
sep 16 btl water tower 1985
Peter was still a department head at that time; he didn't climb
further into management until about 1990.
As I recall, the water tower remained painted for a couple of days.
A two-man team from the Physical Plant department finally covered it
over: one man in overalls wielding paint, another in suit and tie
watching to be sure no trace remained.
Lest people get the wrong idea, Peter took no offense at the
overuse of his face. In fact a few years later he agreed to
have a plaster cast made. Someone (Duff?) then made a latex
positive from the plaster negative, intending to digitize it
somehow into a three-dimensional model. I don't know if that
ever happened, but I did borrow the latex one day, used it to
generate another negative in ice, and cast a large chocolate
truffle which I then set out in the UNIX Room (as the group's
common terminal room was called) for all to enjoy.
That may have been the only really interesting use of the 3d
face. In any case the plaster cast was presented to me when
I left the Labs in 1990, and I still have it, though I haven't
done anything with it since.
There were also some smaller stencils made of the same deathstar-
Peter face. (In fact I have it on good authority that the big
one was made by projecting one of the smaller ones on a wall.)
When Bell Labs bought a Cray X-MP in 1986 or 1987 (my records aren't
that complete), one of our group made several visits to Cray to
get a head start on a special network interface we would need.
He took along one of the small stencils and put a few Peter faces
on panels that were normally covered up when the machine was running.
(The Cray was to be shared by Research and the Comp Center, and the
Comp Center were a bit stuffier.) To everyone's surprise, when the
machine arrived it bore no extra decorations. Presumably Cray shipped
the painted system to another customer; we never found out who.
The Computing Science Research Center was a fun place to work.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Lehey wondered:
> .... can
> you shed any light on the "Peter Weinberger stencil" incident? ...
> Somebody came across the idea of
> making a large stencil of his face in death-star like technology,
> and used it to paint an image of him on a nearby water tower.
> Allegedly the costs were charged to Peter's department.
> Some years later, this stencil arrived in Greg Rose's office in
> Australia from an anonymous sender. Greg has a suspicion who the
> sender was, but no proof, so he doesn't want to comment. He gave it
> to our own Warren Toomey, who still has it in his garage.
> At some point, Peter Salus suggested that the image was of Rob Pike...
I could recover some of the dates, but
not accurately from memory. Weinberger was promoted,
first to department head, then to being director of a
newly-created but next-door center, then to our own
executive director. This would have been mid-late 80s,
early 90s. He was being groomed, it appears.
Shortly before trivestiture, 1994ish, he went to
the business part of AT&T, possibly in preparation
for coming back to a higher management position
at the Labs. When the Lucent/AT&T split occurred
he was somewhat caught on the AT&T side.
He ended up leaving AT&T and going to a financial
quant company.
His image was particularly striking, and was used
to kid him in various ways, e,g, as a default image
in mail icons. The image rendering his
face with the Deathstar styling was done by
Tom Duff, and it appeared, for example, on
T-shirts worn publically at venues like Usenix
and elsewhere. Other versions of it
appear inscribed in concrete now buried
beneath floors at the Labs. There is a
bitmap version (rendered in 1cm magnets) of the
full image, not death-starred, high on
a steel wall above a landing on a nearby
stairwell.
The large stencilled image of the Deathstar/PJW
rendition did indeed appear suddenly one day on
a water tower; it must have been about 10 feet
tall. Kernighan had a photo of it, and Gerard
Holzmann just scanned it:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/pix/watertower.jpg
It was painted over quite rapidly,
a couple of days at most. (The tower itself
is now gone, though not because of this.)
The image was certainly not of Rob Pike.
After this happened, a voucher was pinned up
on a communal corkboard, claiming expenses
for several cans of blue spray paint. The voucher
was signed by one G. R. Emlin, a fictitious personage
with his (later her) own history. Attached to
it was a handwritten note from our then Executive
Director (Vic Vyssotsky) saying approximately
as follows:
Unfortunately, this voucher cannot be
approved by me; I am not empowered
to approve Real Estate improvements.
If Mr. Emlin would like to arrange a transfer
to the Building and Grounds department,
I would be happy to assist.
So: who did it? If Greg Rose suspects certain
aviation-inclined buddies, I in turn think his
suspicions are likely to be well-founded.
I managed to retrieve the image used to create the stencil;
it's now linked-to near the bottom of
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/10thEdMan/v2pix.html
Dennis
I'm looking for a copy of the C reference manual from some time
between the 6th Edition (1975) and the first version that came
with 4.3BSD (1986). The stuff in the TUHS archive mostly seems to
be missing the documentation sets, or in the case of the earlier
BSDs they are ommitted for copyright reasons. There are some
tutorials dating from about 1979 but they aren't much use.
Any help would be appreciated.
Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
DOGGER: NORTHEAST 6 TO GALE 8 BACKING NORTHWEST 4 OR 5. RAIN OR SHOWERS.
MODERATE OR GOOD.
I just recently picked up a copy of a book that's been out for some
time, _Cyberpunk_ by Katie Hafner and John Markoff. The last chapter
is about Robert T. Morris, Jr. and the worm incident (which in itself,
I think, is an important event in Unix history).
The book contains some interesting details, including some Unix folklore
that I haven't seen anywhere else. For instance, RTM Sr. had a terminal
at home, as did other members of the CSR group at Bell Labs. So a number
of their kids had accounts! RTM Sr. comes off as a very likeable fellow,
btw.
At the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1999, Norm Schryer gave a keynote speech,
in which he told an amusing anecdote about Morris Sr. (I may be slightly
off on some details; such is oral history):
Morris, he said, was the kind of guy who always liked to tinker with
things, and if an object had buttons, Morris just had to push them.
In fact, sometimes Morris was just a little too quick with his fingers.
On one side of a machine room was the light switch, and on the other
side was the power to the machine.
On at least one occasion, you guessed it -- Morris hit the wrong switch.
Some people hung a disk pack that got ruined around his neck, and someone
put up a big sign as a reminder: "THIS IS THE WEST WALL!"
:-)
