[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual?

[Clem Cole]

Nothing was secret.

As for 78 or 79 the typesetter release with the Dennis’s new c compiler was
before v7 which was late 79.  I believe that typesetter and Dennis new C
compiler code was released from Patent and Licensing about a year before
V7.

We had it had CMU before I graduated in early ‘79.  I can ask Steve Glaser
but I remember he telling me he has it at Rice also.  I’m not sure what MIT
but I can ask Ward Cunningham if he remembers if Purdue was using it.
There is some stuff in the early USENIX archives.  As I said I know Tom
Ferris was using the vcat and that the version on the BSD tapes. Rob has
suggested Joy had his version from of vcat Toronto.  Vcat was modified to
talk to ditroff although We all started with the assembler version troff
but Joes C rewrite had leaked and many folks had it outside of the labs.

The version of the compiler from the first Typesetter C release has been
extensively discussed here and in other places although the libS.a from it
is available with search.  Plus K&R1 can be found in used form in the used
market and have at least two copies and I’ve seen an PDF scan in the wild
(it’s poor quality).

What I don’t have is the tape from those days.  I know I have the later
Tool Chest version without the compiler from my Masscomp days - 83/84.  As
well as Adobe Transcript.  This is not the same version we had at CMU and
Tektronix that flavor does not seem to be in anything I have found -
although I did recover the first version of the original CMU fsck.  There
are some files from that recovery I have not examined so I may find that
code at some point.


As for what K&R was set on I don’t remember.   It could have been the C/A/T
in research.  But I thought it was set on the larger and newer system in
the MH computer center.  As I said, I once had a xerographic copy of the
proofs but I know are lost.  That said, the actual book is easy to find in
wild.

BTW Brian K was on Brian Reid’s Thesis Committee in 1979 PHD committee
(Brian Reid wrote Scribe at CMU) and his Thesis was on typesetting.  The
first (Pascal) version of Tex was released by Knuth at Stanford around the
same time(and it’s predessor Stanford’s PUB had been around the ARPanet
sites for at least 4 years on the PDP-10 using the XGPs.

The point is that the ideas in ditroff were all being discussed before Joe
died.  His death in the late 70s forced a rewrite by someone else (Brian)
and the APS-5 in the computer center I remember as the original driver.  I
might be mis remembering but I don’t think so since the dates of the
release of the original typesetter and new compiler code from patent and
licensing as well as the publication date of K&R are well documented as
being on V6 not V7 and all of that is pre Judge Green changes to how ATT
does business 3 years later.

Btw I do have an original V7 manual in a US standard 3 ring binder on a
shelf — as it came from Patent and Licensing  which we had printed in
Teklabs after we go the V7 tape. Btw this is not the funky 2 ring BTL
binding that was used in the labs or the more popular format used for PWB
and later the Marx printing of the BSD manuals and later USENIX BSD
versions. But  Sadly the troff tutorial section is missing - I remember I
used to have a copy of the troff related stuff in a separate file that was
in a shelf in my office next to my terminal and I bet I put the troff
tutorial in it.  I’ll look through some of my file cabinets to see if I can
find that file - I must have put into in a cabinet firing a job change and
might have the missing pages from the binder.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Sat, Jan 6, 2024 at 9:17 PM Mychaela Falconia <falcon at freecalypso.org>
wrote:

> Hi Clem,
>
> > Hmmm.. I was thinking of keeping out of this food fight, but a couple of
> > comments concern me a little as they seem to differ from the history as I
> > recall it.
>
> Thank you for various juicy details - but I still have a hard time
> accepting your timeline.  BWK's paper "A Typesetter-independent TROFF"
> (troff source here, file date 30-Mar-1983:
> http://medialab.freaknet.org/martin/tape/stuff/ditroff/docs/indep_troff )
> contains these passages:
>
> | Early in 1979,
> | the Computing Science Research Center
> | decided to acquire a new typesetter,
> | primarily because of our interests in typesetting graphics.
> | At the same time,
> | the Murray Hill Computer Center
> | began to investigate the possibility of replacing their
> | family of aging CAT's
> | with a new, high-performance typesetter,
>
> then
>
> | Accordingly, in the spring of 1979,
> | I set about to modify
> | .UC TROFF
> | so that it would run hence\%forth without change
> | on a variety of typesetters.
>
> then
>
> | This version of
> | .UC TROFF
> | has been in use
> | since September of 1979.
> | Most of our experience with it has been on the
> | 202 and Tektronix scopes, but the CAT and APS-5 drivers have been
> | exercised to some degree.
>
> The "summer vacation" paper gives a similar timeline: 202 acquired in
> summer of '79, troff preparatory work done "ahead of time" (consistent
> with "spring of 1979" in indep_troff paper), production use by Sept of
> 1979 just like indep_troff says.  I admit that I was wrong in my first
> recollection of 1980 or 81 - but I still have a hard time believing
> that there was a _working_ ditroff setup in '78.  Ideas and thoughts
> about moving away from CAT-specific troff - sure - but a working setup
> is a different story.
>
> But of course I wasn't there, and you say you were...  If ditroff
> really did exist in 1978-August when BWK wrote the "Troff tutorial"
> paper (the one that appears right away Ossanna's original manual in V7,
> 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD docs), why does that paper not contain a single word
> about it, talking only about the Graphic Systems typesetter?  Was the
> existence of ditroff a closely guarded secret then?
>
> Back to my original assertion about \(sq character in Bold having
> changed from hollow to filled square while still on CAT-4.  Let's say
> I am wrong here and you are right that it became a filled square only
> in some non-CAT ditroff setup.  But if ditroff was secret, non-releasable
> stuff in 1978 leading up to V7, why did they define "blot" as \fB\(sq\fP
> in /usr/pub/eqnchar?  The distributed system (as of V7) contained only
> CAT-driving troff and no ditroff - so surely eqnchar was produced to
> be usable by users of the as-is distributed system...
>
> My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me otherwise, I
> shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7
> Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving
> troff, and that the filled \(sq in Bold in V7 manuals (in this trofftut
> document and eqnchar(7) man page in Vol1) indicates that this filled
> square was present in Bold on CAT-4.  Yet this square being hollow in
> all 3 font samples in Ossanna's original 1976 manual in the very same
> V7 Vol2 indicates that the font was different back in '76.  The only
> explanation that fits is that some time between 1976-10 and 1978-08
> the Bold film strip on the CAT was changed to an updated version from
> GSI.
>
> > This is true - although I believe that the processor was from Autologic,
> > the typesetter was from Alphanumeric Corp.
>
> So why are all papers from those days (ditroff docs, Usenix print notes
> for 4.3BSD) referring to it as Autologic APS-5?
>
> > the 1978 version of the K&R (which I thought was set on the APS-5 for the
> > first version - although it may have been on the Meganthaler).    While I
> > still have a first edition, at one time, I had a copy of the proofs,
> which
> > I got from tjk in late 1977 IIRC - it might have been the Fall of '78
>
> Now this part is intriguing.  Wikipedia says the 1st ed of K&R C book
> was published February 22, 1978.  Are you *absolutely certain* it was
> troffed on APS-5 or Linotron 202 etc?  (I never got a copy, so I don't
> have a colophon to look at.)  If this book, published in early 1978,
> was indeed produced on a setup that was only possible with ditroff,
> then why did BWK tell the story of *beginning* ditroff coding work
> (actual implementation, not just thoughts/ideas) in spring of '79 in
> preparation for 202 arriving that summer?
>
> Another inexplicable mystery with this hypothesis: if ditroff was in
> some working state (good enough to publish a book) in 1978-Feb, why in
> the world was it excluded from V7 release - and not only excluded as
> in shipping code, but total suppression of any mention of its existence?
>
> > - Alphanumeric Corp released the Alphanumeric Photocomposition System
> > (APS) #5 in 1976 using an Autologic-73 mini to drive it.
>
> Thank you for decoding what APS stood for!  Although in my mind it will
> probably always be "avtomaticheskiy pistolet Stechkina" in my native
> Russian. :-)
>
> M~
>
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