[TUHS] First book on Unix for general readership

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2020, 9:19 AM markus schnalke <meillo at marmaro.de> wrote:

> Hoi,
>
> found on Wikipedia:
>
>         As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger
>         and The UNIX System, the second book on the UNIX system,
>         intended for a general readership.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_R._Bourne
>
> Thus I now wonder what the first book on Unix, intended for a
> general readership was.
>
> Bourne's book was published 1983.
>
> (``The UNIX Programming Environment'' was published 1984.)
>
>
> Was it Banahan and Rutter's ``UNIX -- the Book''? It says 1982.
>
> Could anyone share some background on that one? (The authors were
> from Bradford University.)
>
> I only have the German translation by Axel T. Schreiner, dated
> 1984. Haven't read the English original, but Schreiner's version
> definitely is worth to read (if you speak German). He added lots
> of footnotes, and it becomes apparent that he knows the system
> better than the authors. ;-)
>
>
> I'd like to get an understanding of the books in relation to each
> other. How does the Banahan/Rutter book fit into the picture? Why
> didn't Bell Labs write a user's book earlier? Were Bourne's and
> Kernighan/Pike's books reactions to it?
>

All good questions. I just bought both of these 9n ebay (there are several
copies available for <$10 so I didn't feel bad about sniping a rarity from
others in this group).

But I don't know the back stories.

Warner


> meillo
>
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