Warner, I should have copies of it, I'm also in email contact with both Tom T. (aka tjt - who is someone I reference often on this list) and Janet (Tom often weekly). As for history, until Janet created that document for Masscomp, nothing existed other than a short paper I believe Dennis wrote for V6 and updated for V7. Cliff and Tom A had spent hours in Tom and my shared office picking our brains. What they came up with was not quite right (to be polite) and tjt attempted to fix it - which at least was technically correct. Janet has the head of Masscomp's documentation group, re-wrote Tom's version to make it easier to understand. I should have the version in my files [Janet might even have the original troff sources]. When Tim O'Reilly (who had been writing a lot of our doc under contract and started to do the original 'nutshell' series) cut a deal to take the documentation he was writing for us 'out of Masscomp' and publish it (thus creating the original X-Windows documentation and the first real hit for ORA), precedent had been set. Shortly after, Tom and I had left for Belmont, ney Stellar, and Janet and Tom decided to redo it as a book. ??? On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 9:50 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > Greetings, > > I'm trying to find the predecessor to "Writing a UNIX Device Driver, J. > Egan & T. Teixeira, 1st ed, 1988". In the preface, it says: > > "This book is based on a MASSCOMP manual, Guide to Writing a Unix Device > Driver. The first version that MASSCOMP published as part of the > documentation set for the MC-500 was based on preliminary drafts prepared > for MASSCOMP by Cliff Cary and Tom Albough of Creare R&D." > > I checked bit keepers and found nothing. > > I was wondering if people on this list know of this manual, have a copy, > etc. In general, I'm looking for pre-SysV driver manuals. I can find all > kinds of SysV driver books (some of which cover 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD as well), > but nothing for System III or V7 unix. There were a lot of early systems > that were based on ports of V7 to different architectures that were then > updated to System III or System V (at least according to the big chart of > unix history and some wikipedia entries, which may be just repeating > marketing schlock and not reflect actual reality). > > As part of a talk I'm putting together on the 40th anniversary of V7, I > wanted to have a bit of history for things we still have in unix today > (like strategy) and things that successors to unix have added or left > behind (like the packet mux in V7 that was tossed aside for either STREAMS > or netinet from BSD, though packet muxing to userland is back with DPDK). > > Warner >