[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

Dan Cross crossd at gmail.com
Wed May 16 01:14:30 AEST 2018


On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So what's the back story with PWB?  It seems like sort of a back water
> but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.  I feel like there
> was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
> common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose.  So far
> as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
> they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
> originals.
>

I think you mean 'style' and 'diction'. I thought those came from research?
I remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or
4.2/4.3BSD? Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing it with
BSD, but I thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick look shows a
copy in 7th Ed.

        - Dan C.


On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> > The PWB children used -mm  I seem to remember that the base system 3 and
> maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If
> you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
> >
> > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
> quite.
> >
> > > On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason
> I still
> > > > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still
> use it to
> > > > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> > > >
> > > > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> > >
> > > I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that
> came with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which
> it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
> > >
> > >         - Dan C.
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180515/234ceaba/attachment.html>


More information about the TUHS mailing list