[TUHS] Looking back to 1981 - what pascal was popular on what unix?

Dan Cross crossd at gmail.com
Sat Jan 29 09:18:34 AEST 2022


On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:09 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm reading in, Kernighan & Plauger's 1981 edition of Software Tools in
> Pascal and in the book, the author's mention Bill Joy's Pascal and Andy
> Tanenbaum's as being rock solid. So, a few related questions:
>
> 1. What edition of UNIX were they likely to be using?
>

I'm afraid I can't speak to your 2nd and 3rd questions, but I can offer
what I think is a reasonable guess about the first.

One of the neat things about Unix and Unix-adjacent books of that era is
that very often the copyright page held some information about the
production of the book itself. I just so happened to have a copy of,
"Software Tools in Pascal" sitting on my desk, and it says, "This books as
set in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using a Mergenthaler
Linotron 202 phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 running the Unix
operating system."

Given the PDP-11 and the date (1981) one may reasonably conclude that it
was running 7th Edition. I imagine the pascal was Joy's, from Berkeley.

        - Dan C.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20220128/ccd25c27/attachment.htm>


More information about the TUHS mailing list