24 Nov
2015
24 Nov
'15
1:55 a.m.
Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
It does not resemble the familiar layout of the numbered
editions. Besides the usual overview of kernel and shell,
it describes system calls and some commands, in a layout
unrelated to the familiar man-page style. Detailed
reference/tutorial manuals for as, roff, db and ed
are included as appendices.
The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer
of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
appears on page 1.
A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?
Doug
24 Nov
24 Nov
2:57 a.m.
On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 08:55:36PM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found
a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
It does not resemble the familiar layout of the numbered
editions. Besides the usual overview of kernel and shell,
it describes system calls and some commands, in a layout
unrelated to the familiar man-page style. Detailed
reference/tutorial manuals for as, roff, db and ed
are included as appendices.
The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer
of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
appears on page 1.
A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?
No, I've not seen anything before Dennis' scan of the 1st
Edition manuals. Can you make a scan of this one available?
Many thanks, Warren
6:41 a.m.
On 2015-11-24, Doug McIlroy wrote:
The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX
contains a numer
of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
appears on page 1.
A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?
Is this The UNIX Time-Sharing System, or related to it? The same
claim appears in the first paragraph:
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html
28 Nov
28 Nov
11:24 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 08:55:36PM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found
a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
Doug has kindly made available a scan of this document. I've placed
a copy of it into the Unix Archive at:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/
It's certainly an interesting read. It comes across as a mingling
of the CACM paper and the user manuals. I'd love to get a more
definite date than 1971, though.
Many thanks for this, Doug!
Cheers, Warren
29 Nov
29 Nov
2:01 a.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:24:13AM +1100, Warren Toomey wrote:
It's certainly an interesting read. It comes
across as a mingling
of the CACM paper and the user manuals. I'd love to get a more
definite date than 1971, though.
Edit: mid-1971.
Cheers, Warren
2:31 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
Thank you both.
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 28, 2015, at 9:01 PM, Warren Toomey
<wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:24:13AM +1100, Warren
Toomey wrote:
It's certainly an interesting read. It comes across as a mingling
of the CACM paper and the user manuals. I'd love to get a more
definite date than 1971, though.
Edit: mid-1971.
Cheers, Warren
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8:21 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> writes:
On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 08:55:36PM -0500, Doug McIlroy
wrote:
Anyone else notice that create(2) is spelled with an "e" (Sec. 3.5.2)?
But not in the appendix A1.6...
--
Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen(a)gmail.com> http://chneukirchen.org
Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have
found a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
Doug has kindly made available a scan of this document. I've placed
a copy of it into the Unix Archive at:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/
It's certainly an interesting read. 
8:40 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
> Anyone else notice that create(2) is spelled with
an "e" (Sec. 3.5.2)?
> But not in the appendix A1.6...
I did when I read UnixEditionZero.pdf this morning. I seem to recall
Dennis or Ken being quoted as having said that the one thing they'd
do over in Unix was to spell "creat" with a final "e".
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
9:45 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
>> Anyone else notice that create(2) is spelled
with an "e" (Sec. 3.5.2)?
>> But not in the appendix A1.6...
"Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe(a)math.utah.edu> wrote:
I did when I read UnixEditionZero.pdf this morning. I
seem to recall
Dennis or Ken being quoted as having said that the one thing they'd
do over in Unix was to spell "creat" with a final "e".
It was Ken. And indeed he did so, for Plan 9.
Arnold
30 Nov
30 Nov
4:02 a.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
Warren Toomey scripsit:
It's certainly an interesting read.
Some things that strike me particularly:
- the presence of only one execute bit (a file is either executable or
it isn't!)
- the "@" prompt of the shell
- the blocked paper tape driver
- the fact that ^\ causes an arbitrary non-shell process to core dump
if several are running and DEL (aka ^C) does not exist yet
- the fact that switches don't yet exist (and indeed when passing files
to the B interpreter one must precede them with a hyphen)
I also note the marginal "NO!" next to the statement that the second
argument to 'creat' is the file mode. I wonder what that was about.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
"Make a case, man; you're full of naked assertions, just like Nietzsche."
"Oh, i suffer from that, too. But you know, naked assertions or GTFO."
--heard on #scheme, sorta
4:26 a.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
On Sun, 29 Nov 2015, John Cowan wrote:
I also note the marginal "NO!" next to the
statement that the second
argument to 'creat' is the file mode. I wonder what that was about.
I liked the way that fork(label) worked, although the assembler doc says
it's a white lie...
And I think page A7 is missing.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
26 Dec
26 Dec
2:09 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:24:13AM +1100, Warren Toomey wrote:
I've just spent the evening OCR'ing it with tesseract and then hand cleaning
the output. A plain text (no formatting) version is now at:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEd…
Doug, page A7 is missing. Could you e-mail in a scan of that page?
I am still amazed at how eloquent and succinct Dennis was at writing.
This document is an amazing introduction to the ideas and features of
Unix. It's a pity they didn't take this to SOSP in 1971!
Cheers, Warren
Among the
papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
Doug has kindly made available a scan of this document.
26 Jan
26 Jan
11:15 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 12:09:03AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEd…
Doug, page A7 is missing. Could you e-mail in a scan of that page?
Doug reports in a private e-mail that the physical page A7 is missing,
so he is unable to scan it in. Oh well.
Cheers, Warren
11:46 p.m.
New subject: Scan of "Edition 0" manual
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 12:09:03AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
Actually, we can probably substitute part of the db(1) man page from 1st
Edition Unix for the missing page A7:
= When preceded by an expression, the value of the
expression is typed in octal. When not preceded by an
expression, the value of. "." is indicated. This
command does not change the value of ".".
: An attempt is made to print the given expression as a
symbolic address. If the expression is relocatable,
that symbol is found whose value is nearest that of
the expression, and the symbol is typed, followed by a
sign and the appropriate offset. If the value of the
expression is absolute, a symbol with exactly the
indicated value is sought and printed if found; if no
matching symbol is discovered, the octal value of the
expression is given.
The following command may be used to patch the file being
debugged.
! This command must be preceded by an expression. The
value of the expression is stored at the location
addressed by the current value of "." . The opcodes do
not appear in the symbol table, so the user must
assemble them by hand.
The following command is used after a fault has caused a core
image file to be produced.
$ causes the contents of the general registers and
several other registers to be printed both in octal
and symbolic format. The values are as they were at
the time of the fault.
The only way to exit from db is to generate an end of file
on the typewriter (EOT character).
Cheers, Warren
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEd…
Doug, page A7 is missing. Could you e-mail in a scan of that page?
Doug reports in a private e-mail that the physical page A7 is missing,
so he is unable to scan it in. Oh well.
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14 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Christian Neukirchen -
Clem cole -
Dave Horsfall -
Doug McIlroy -
John Cowan -
Nelson H. F. Beebe -
Random832 -
Warren Toomey