[TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sun Apr 14 04:35:19 AEST 2019


    > From: Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org>

    > That's all I knew at the time :-)

:-) I used nroff/troff for a bit, but I didn't like it; I don't recall why,
but I suspect I wasn't using people's macro packages, which probably made it
more difficult to use. My favourite was SCRIBE, but it alas seems to have
died.

    > From: Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com>

    >> the original Western Electric copies are not troff'ed and run through
    >> a typesetter ...

    > Indeed. Even the mid-90's Peer-to-Peer press reprinting appears to be,
    > roughly, a facsimile of line printer output. ...
    > Interestingly, the title page appears to be approximately original and
    > is typeset.

I finally located my copy of the reprint (I'd been using it to help Fritz
Mueller find a problem in his RK11C, and it wasn't in its normal place), and
comparing it with my 'samizdat' set (which came from a set owned by
Lincoln-Sudbury High School - they actually had an -11 running V6, I helped
their computer person, I forget his name now, with it), I can confirm that:

- The reprint does mostly reproduce the exact page images from the original
(which was indeed, mostly line-printer out), except that the original does not
have the typeset chapter/section header pages. It's possible that the pages in
the reprint are a new printing, but if so, they have exactly matched not only
the layout (not too hard) of the original, but also the font.

- In a couple of places (e.g. Contents, pg. 1; Preface, pg. 1; Chapter One,
pg. 1) "UNIX" has been replaced by "UNIX*" (different font), and at the bottom
of the page has been added "* UNIX is a Trademark of Bell Laboratories", again
in a different font.

- The typeset 'Source Code' title page is in the original; the copy in the
reprint is an exact image, except that the upper-case "This information ...
Written permission of Bell Laboratories" section is not in the original,
which says instead at that place: "This document may contain information
covered by one or more licenses, copyrights and non-disclosure agreements.
Circulation of this document is restricted to holders of a license for the
UNIX Software System from Western Electric. All other circulation or
reproduction is prohibited."

- The typeset 'Commentary' title page is different in my samizdat First
Edition original; it's a copy of the other title page, except that the
second para is replaced by the first sentence of the 'Commentary' title
page of the reprint, and of course the title is different from the other
volume.

	Noel


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