[TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

Peter Jeremy peter at rulingia.com
Wed Jun 26 12:28:24 AEST 2019


[Resurrecting an old thread to provide some input from Dave Horsfall]
On 2019-Apr-11 06:52:08 +0200, Fabio Scotoni <fabio at esse.ch> wrote:
>On 4/11/19 1:19 AM, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> On Apr 10, 2019, at 3:24 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> [...] is the Lions book including PS and PDF and in the original troff thankfully.
>> 
>> May be someone will be inspired enough to convert this to troff?
...
>Thus, the first step would be to reverse engineer the troff macros used
>to typeset the book.
>Then the TeX sources would need to be converted to those troff macros;
>this can possibly be automated entirely.
>Then the matching version of troff would need to be used to typeset it
>(likely via apout and V6 or V7 troff).
>Finally, the C/A/T typesetter output would need to be converted to
>PostScript or PDF (either Adobe's psroff or Chris Lewis's psroff from
>comp.unix.sources can likely help with that; I got Lewis's psroff to
>work a while ago, but it's pretty brittle).

On 2019-Jun-26 11:34:31 +1000, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>'Twas NROFF on the CSU's LA120 (I should know; I ran the Unix section),
>with draft versions on a Duckwriter which I helped proof-read.  Don't know
>whether custom macros were used; quite likely, as he was that sort of
>bloke.  After all, he was a Comp Sci lecturer (one of mine!) and if you
>find yourself writing the same lines over and over again...
>
>Going by that snippet of the thread (too much to follow, as I'm still
>figuring out from which lists I've been bounced) it would be a heroic
>effort to reverse-engineer it, and quite likely not worth the trouble.
>
>The original source would've been at Elec Eng, but long gone by now.
>
>As for TROFF, well, I'm not aware that UNSW has a C/A/T :-)
>
>Oh, the LA120 had a single-use nylon ribbon, I think, not fabric, hence
>the somewhat high quality (I no longer have my Lions books to check; lost
>after several house moves).

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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