[TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Mary Ann Horton]

Eric Shienbrood at Berkeley wrote "more" around 1979, and it was the 
standard BSD pager. It was inspired by the --More-- option in the ITS 
terminal driver at MIT.

"pg" did not come from Berkeley. My recollection is that it came from 
AT&T in response to requests to include "more", which was in exptools at 
Bell Labs but not in any standard AT&T system. "pg" is not in my UNIX 
5.0 manual, but it's in my SVID with the comment "New in System V 
Release 2".

UNIX 5.0 was the AT&T internal pre-release of System V.  SVID was the 
System V Interface Definition from AT&T.

     Mary Ann

On 6/14/20 3:52 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
> All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you have
> an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?
>
> Thanks, Warren
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi at malbolge.net> -----
>
> Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
> From: Michael Siegel <msi at malbolge.net>
> To: wkt at tuhs.org
> Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager
>
> Hi there,
>
> I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.
>
> The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
> System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
> historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]
>
> I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
> package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
> utility.”[2]
>
> I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
> into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
> the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
> Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
> the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
> available.
>
> Any ideas on how to proceed?
>
>
> Best
> Michael
>
>
> [1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)),
>      but I've also found other sites stating the same.
>
> [2]
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-utils/pg.c
>
> [3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----