[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual?

Mychaela Falconia falcon at freecalypso.org
Sat Jan 6 08:17:23 AEST 2024


Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX,

Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original
printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition?  Does such a thing
exist?  Given that Brian S. Walden produced and published a PDF reprint
of this manual (presumably done with some "modern" version of troff)
back in 1998, I reason that there probably wasn't much interest in
preserving the original print by painstaking scanning (and the files
from such a scan would have been ginormous by 1998 standards), hence I
am not certain if such a scanned version exists - but I thought I
would ask nonetheless.

I was however very pleased to discover that some very kind soul named
Erica Fischer did scan and upload the complete set of Usenix printed
books for 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD - here is the 4.2BSD version:

https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-supplement-4.2bsd
https://archive.org/details/smm-4.2bsd

and here is 4.3BSD:

https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-sup1-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/upm-sup2-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/smm-4.3bsd
https://archive.org/details/uum-index-4.3bsd

It is my understanding that all supplementary docs (the papers that
were originally in volumes 2a and 2b in the V7 manual) were retroffed
by UCB/Usenix for 4.3BSD edition, but the earlier 4.2BSD Usenix print
seems to be different - it looks like for 4.2BSD they only did a new
troff run for all man pages and for new (Berkeley-added) supplementary
docs, but in the case of docs which originally appeared in V7 vol 2,
it appears that Usenix did some kind of analogue mass reproduction
from a historical V7 master, *without* doing a new troff run on those
docs.  *If* this hypothesis is correct, then Erica's uploaded scan of
4.2BSD manuals can serve as a practical substitute for the presumably-
missing scan of the original printing of V7 manual - but I would like
to double-check my hypothesis with others who are presumably more
knowledgeable about this ancient history (some of you actually lived
through that history, unlike me!), hence the reason for this post.

I would appreciate either confirmation or correction of the guesses
and conjectures I expressed above.

M~


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