Greg,

I got manpages! Thanks. I took the tarball, extracted the files, cpio'd 'em onto a tape cartridge image, pulled 'em off the cartridge onto /usr2/manpages, installed the Documenter's Workbench and:

nroff -man echo.1
     ECHO(1)                   UNIX System V                   ECHO(1)



     NAME
          echo - echo arguments

     SYNOPSIS
          echo [ arg ] ...

Yeeha.

Now to type in Stephen's version of man in shell script form :).

Thanks,

Will

On 12/28/21 3:21 PM, Greg A. Woods wrote:
At Mon, 27 Dec 2021 09:11:20 -0800, "Seth Morabito" <web@loomcom.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [TUHS] manpages in svr2
I don't believe AT&T ever distributed manpages for the 3B2, but if I'm
wrong and someone has a link to a set, I would be very happy to
archive them! It's quite possible that at some point someone compiled
a set of manpages as a third-party package, but unfortunately so many
of the old 3B2 archives disappeared in the late 2000s before I (or
anyone else I know) had a chance to archive them completely.
I definitely had man pages on my 3B2/400 with SysVr3 (and r3.2).

They were pre-formatted (catman), not troff source though, IIRC.

This was true for all of UNIX System V, at least from 2.0 on.

There was a separate "source" distribution for the documentation, called
the "Machine Readable Documentation", aka MRD.  It contains source for
all of the system documentation, not just the manual pages.

The separation was necessary due to the separate licensing of the
Documenter's Workbench.  You couldn't format roff documents without it,
not even with nroff, so source for the documentation would be useless to
anyone who didn't also license DWB.  (IIRC some Unix licensees kept
their versions of V7 nroff working on their later SysV releases so that
they could ship man page sources that would be usable, but using that
ancient troff with modern printers was painful even with Chris Lewis'
psroff.)

The archive.org copy of SysVr2.0-NS32k contains source for DWB, MRD, as
well as the system and commands:

https://archive.org/download/ATTUNIXSystemVRelease4Version2/SysVr2.0_32000.tgz

I don't know if it is legal or not, but it's been there for ages.

IIRC somewhere there on archive.org there's also a SysVr2 for VAX too,
complete with binaries and sources, and it has catman pages included.

I do happen to have a copy of the MRD for SysVr3.2 for 3B2, but I don't
think it is legal.  I also had a legal binary license for DWB-2.0 for
3B2, but I don't think I have a copy of the media any more.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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