[TUHS] Origins and life of the pg pager

[David Barto]

My January 1983 printing of the System V Unix* System User’s Manual doesn’t have pg in it.

And my 1986 AT&T The Unix(tm) System Users Manual for System V Release 2 also doesn’t have it.

	David

> On Jun 14, 2020, at 4:37 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:
> 
> 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 -----