[TUHS] Origins and life of the pg pager

[Charles H. Sauer]

My memory is that pg was “always” in AIX for the RT. The group of us that worked on BSD convergence deprecated pg in favor of more, if I recall correctly. So far I don’t know how to verify any of this.

It is also my memory that PC/IX (Sys III-based?) had pg. If so, ISC may have also included similar pg in both early AIX and PC/IX.

Charlie

> On Jun 14, 2020, at 8:38 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> Here's what I've found:
> 
> There's a pg.c, starting in System Vr2. R1 didn't have it.
> 
> It changed in a number of fussy ways, but nothing substantial.
> 
> It grew that copyright notice in SVr3, but the sun one quoted is missing
> /*     Copyright (c) 1990, 1991 UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. */
> that should have been there to, suggesting it was snagged between r2 and r3.
> 
> There's also two other copies of pg as well. There's one in 32V. Though a quick diff suggests little in common with the System Vr2 version.
> 
> There's also one in the BRL/JHU pdp-11 version of unix that is nearly identical to the System Vr2 one. Though it's dated 1985 while the SVr2 one is 1983. Both with a 1984 copyright by AT&T.
> 
> SunOS 4.1.3 shipped with the System Vr2 version. in 5bin.
> 
> Irix 6.5.5 had what looks like the System Vr3 copy in it, though I didn't delve into it.
> 
> So this supports the recollections here that it was from System Vr2...
> 
> However, there's also a Doug Gwen version from the Delaware 1980 Usenix tape submitted by geotronics and on other tapes. Haven't delved on what makes these different from each other though.
> 
> There's one in the NOSC unix we have in the archive, unrelated, it seems to either of these. It's dated in 1979.
> 
> There's still another one on the UNSW tapes from 1978 by Sape Mullender Informatics staff Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Also independent. It's on the 4th tape we have in the archive.
> 
> 10th edition also has pg.c, but it's an I/O pager for the kernel.
> 
> Which explains another comment in the System Vr2 one:
>  *      Note:   The reason that there are so many commands to do
>  *              the same types of things is to try to accommodate
>  *              users of other paginators.
> 
> Warner
> 
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 6:36 PM Alan D. Salewski <salewski at att.net <mailto:salewski at att.net>> wrote:
> [missed a footnote; fixed]
> 
> On 2020-06-14 20:31:13, Alan D. Salewski spake thus:
> > 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 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC>
> 
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX>
> 
> -- 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> a l a n   d.   s a l e w s k i                   salewski at att.net <mailto:salewski at att.net>
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