[TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

Dan Cross crossd at gmail.com
Fri Apr 12 00:54:57 AEST 2019


On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 9:49 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> As my very fragile nth edition photocopy shows, the original Western
> Electric copies are not troff'ed and run through a typesetter because John
> (like most of us at the time) did not have access to one (and Tom Ferrin
> had not yet done the vcat(1) hack at UCSF).  Lions used standard nroff
> output - (in this case, originally to 132 column line printer paper I
> believe).
>

Indeed. Even the mid-90's Peer-to-Peer press reprinting appears to be,
roughly, a facsimile of line printer output. I say 'roughly' because there
is some prefatory material at the beginning that is properly typeset:
dedications, acknowledgements, etc, all written at the time of
(re)publication and similarly a set of "appreciations" at the end.

Interestingly, the title page appears to be approximately original and is
typeset. It also includes this little gem of a note: "COPY NO. 050B  NAME
PROPERTY OF BELL LABORATORIES, INC. COPY TO BE RETURNED TO: COMPUTING
INFORMATION SERVICE MH 2F-128 UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM SOURCE CODE VERSION 6"
(line breaks elided).

I don't think I've ever seen a copy of the original; I suspect the title
page was reset for the PP publication, though it is of course possible that
Lions could have prepared that specially: doing a "one-off" for a single
page, perhaps under contract with an actual publishing company or graphic
artist or something, would have been reasonable while the rest of the
booklet contents were taken from listings.


> [snip]
>
>
        - Dan C.
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