[TUHS] Origins and life of the pg pager

[Alan D. Salewski]

I first encountered 'pg' on an IBM RT[0] running AIX 2.x, whose wikipedia
page[1] describes it this way:

    "AIX is based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions"

-Al

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC

On 2020-06-14 16:52:45, David Barto spake thus:
> 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 -----
> 

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a l a n   d.   s a l e w s k i                   salewski at att.net
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