[TUHS] Original Unix SOSP paper?

Warren Toomey wkt at tuhs.org
Sat Sep 29 09:55:12 AEST 2018


On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 05:20:53PM -0600, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> asks on Sat, 29 Sep 2018 09:04:44 +1000 for
> a copy of the  original 1972/73 paper on The UNIX TIME-SHARING SYSTEM
> that was published at the SOSP Proceedings of the fourth ACM
> symposium on operating system principles.
> 
> The URL in this entry from unix.bib works for me:

Ah, but:

>   remark =       "This electronic edition of this paper is a reprint of
>                  the version appearing in The Bell System Technical
>                  Journal 57 no. 6, part 2 (July--August 1978). In turn,
>                  that was a revised version of an article that appeared
>                  in Communications of the ACM, 17, No. 7 (July 1974),
>                  pp. 365--375. That article was a revised version of a
>                  paper presented at the Fourth ACM Symposium on
>                  Operating Systems Principles, IBM Thomas J. Watson
>                  Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, October
>                  15--17, 1973. Most of the differences between versions
>                  occur between the C. ACM version and the BSTJ printing;
>                  we incorporated updated numbers and material on
>                  portability.",

so not the original SOSP paper or the original 1974 CACM paper :-)

However, it's yet another version of the paper.

I've spent some time tracking down the various "versions" of this paper.
So far, I know of:

+ the mid-1971 draft, available at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero-Threshold_OCR.pdf
+ a later version which is in the Nokia Bell Labs archives, which I 
  haven't been able to get my hands on
+ the SOSP presentation, still unclear if there was an actual paper
+ the 1974 CACM paper
+ the version in 6th Edition Unix, available at https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/doc/unix
+ the 1978 BSTL version cited above

Are there any others that people know about that I've missed?

I would like to do some work on how the content changed over time.
The result would be, for me, an interesting paper to read but somehow
I think the readership base would be limited :-)

Cheers, Warren



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