[TUHS] Ninth Edition incomplete?

I'll have to have a look at what's actually in the archive, but it's important to understand that there was barely a `distribution' of 8/e and never really any of subsequent systems. There was a distinct V8 tape, assembled mainly by Dennis with some help from me, in the fall of 1984. It did not exactly match the manuals that were printed, I think only for internal use, a few months before. It was sent out to about a dozen universities (and perhaps other sorts of non-commercial places), with an individual letter agreement with each destination to cover licensing. Anything after that from the original Computing Science Research Centre was effectively just random snapshots. There was a Ninth Edition manual printed up, but it still didn't really match the state of the system, partly because nobody felt up to doing the all that work and partly because various parts of the system were still changing rapidly. I remember personally making a few such snapshots at various times, e.g. one for a certain university (again under a one-off letter agreement), another for the official UNIX System Labs folks in Summit (I took the tape over there personally and helped get the system running). I have no idea whether any of those is in Warren's archives, and I don't remember whether anyone else made any such snapshots, though my role in the group by then was such that I'd probably have been involved. The `V9 for Sun' distribution was done by someone from one of our sister groups. He took a snapshot of our system at some point and worked from that. There wasn't any organized way to keep his stuff in sync with ours, and I don't think his stuff got a lot of use in the long run so there was little motivation to fix that. All of that at least partly explains the skew between system and manual pages; it was really like that. (Remember, we were a research group, not a production computing centre or a development shop.) Snapshots may have been made hastily enough that some things were missed, too. The 10/e manual came out in early 1990. It happened because enough of us wanted to have a current manual again, Doug was willing to take on the big task of overall editing for Volume 1, and Andrew Hume was energized to make Volume 2 happen--the first Volume 2 since the Seventh Edition. There was a lot of rewriting, cleanup, merging of related entries, and discarding of stuff we no longer used or no longer considered an official part of the system. I remember that the first printed copies arrived just in time for me to get one before I left the wretched suburbs forever in June 1990. Since I'd spent a lot of time working over the power-of-two sections (2 4 8), I was pleased about that. One thing that helped energize others about that manual, by the way, was that I felt the parts I was responsible for were way, way out of date, and that it was no longer accurate for the system to call itself Ninth Edition when it booted. But Edition always meant the manual, so Tenth Edition would be wrong too. I made the boot message say 9Vr2. I figured that would annoy people enough to help convince them to help get a new manual out. I have no data as to how big a help that was. I don't know how many `V10 distributions' Warren has at this point, but one of them is derived from a snapshot I made during a visit to Bell Labs in 1994 or 1995. I had rescued some MicroVAXes before they disappeared into dumpsters, and decided it would be fun to set up a system or two running Research UNIX for my private enjoyment. (I was working at a university that had a letter agreement for 9/e--one of the tapes I'd made, in fact--and a certain department head at Bell Labs decided that as long as I didn't spread the code around, that was probably enough to keep lawyers happy.) I made rather a raw snapshot of the root, /usr, and the whole master source-code area, but with /etc/passwd trimmed of any real passwords. Some years later (and with the help of the resulting running systems) I made a few tar images for Warren to keep in his secret box pending the license issue (which we were discussing even back then). I removed some stuff that didn't belong to Bell Labs and wasn't really part of the system (e.g. some big mathematical packages, a huge bolus of X11 code that had never compiled and never would), and segregated in a separate tar image some stuff that was arguably part of the system but that might technically belong to others (e.g. our workhorse C compiler was based on pcc2, work scj had done over at USG/USL after he'd left the Research world). None of that was really curated either, and there had certainly been further changes to the system since the final 1990 manual was printed, not all of which had been properly reflected in /usr/man. So don't call those systems distributions, because they're not. More important, don't expect them to be fully coherent, because they aren't: they're snapshots, not formal releases. Norman Wilson Toronto ON