[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual?

[Brian Walden]

Since this is my work, and it was the first PDF produced from the troff
sources. So let me set the stage, and this should answer some of the
issues you and others have with my work.  This was 25 years ago.
There were not any scanned images of these documents it be
found anywhere online. There was only the incomplete troff sources that were
available on a bell labs web page, and that was hardly usable. I wanted an
online human readable, computer searchable and a print it anywhere document.
That meant one format to me, PDF.

So I went about to produce one. It was so much harder than anticipated.
I spent a lot of my spare time doing it, it took me months to complete.
Someone all ready posted my notes on how I made it in an earlier message.
Once I got it to a state where I was happy with it, I stopped. Also the
only thing I had to compare my version to was a physical copy of a reprint
of the The Bell System Technical Journal Vol 57, No 6, Part 2, July-August
1978 (It had a red cover with the AT&T death star logo, not the original blue
cover, nor the 1984 version with a yellow cover). And the book's pages
were not US printer paper size of 8.5"x11" but were 5"x8".

It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl,
eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU
ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from
them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to
troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979).  That code to produce PostScript
outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by
Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department
45268). As in the mid 1980s, the computer centers had a SRP (small remote
printer) initiative that deployed QMS laser printers (they could only do
PostScript level 1) in common areas near where their users were, and connected
via datakit or direct serial lines. These QMS printers obsoleted the large
and chemically nasty phototypesetters, so they all disappeared from the
computer centers.

Anyway, now I have a whole bunch of PostScript files, that is hardly
usable to read on screen.  Nor very searchable, and ONLY printable on
PostScript printers. The place I was working at the time decided to save
a few dollars, they did not get Adobe licenses for most of their printers,
so they could only print PCL. Luckily the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 3)
which was available on most platforms, could print to PCL. So I need to convert
this into PDF. In 1998 there are not too many options. I tried ghostscript but
it was too immature to produce anything acceptable to me. I ended up buying my
own Adobe Distiller out of pocket, the Windows 95 version, since it was much
cheaper than the Solaris as that was only available as a Distiller "server"
version.

So I then transferred the PostScript files to my windows machine and turned
them into the 3 PDFs. But there was a bug in Distiller, it had and offset
problem on the lines of every tbl, eqn, or pic, on every platform it was
an obvious problem, either viewing it on screen or printing it (both PS and
PCL). So I wrote a awk script to modify many of the PostScript files to fix
the wrong offset. If you viewed or printed a modified PS file, it looked like
it had offset error, but now in the opposite direction. But once distilled
into a PDF, that PDF looked and printed like it should. So those modified PS
files wound be of no value to share. I then manually add the bookmarks and
blank pages that allowed two side printing using the same windows distiller.

I had shown it to some others and they thought it was pretty great. But I
cannot publish nor host these as this is not my intellectual property and
I would need permission. At this time there was not very much available on
TUHS, some binary versions all without any source code, that you could boot
up on SIMH.

I decided I should drop a note to Dennis Ritchie with a copy of the PDFs
to see what he tought. Since I had known Dennis slightly from my time working
at Murray Hill. I lived across the street from the labs on Burlington Rd and
skateboarded into work. It was just across the east employee parking lot, and I
 would use that eastern entrance.  Dennis also lived in the neighborhood, a
bit farther from the labs than me, in a cul-de-sac.  For a full week once,
Dennis kept the complete opposite hours than I did. We would passed each other
at the guard station at the entrance. After a few times it got to be a bit
comical. Me entering 9ish, "good night Dennis" He would smile. Me leaving
5-6ish: "good morning Dennis". We would exchange pleasantries. I had
to walk the skateboard past the guard a bit and not jump back on it, else the
guard would give chase, yelling not to skate in the hallway. I always had the
idea if someone wanted to sneak into the labs they'd just need to wait for
me to go in in the morning, and once the guard was chasing me, they could just
walk on in unchallenged. If you worked in MH from 1990-1992 and saw someone
on a black on top, neon green bottom skateboard, headed from 2F-164 to the
stock room, that was me.

Dennis really like the PDFs, and we had a email discussion on what to do with
it as it was a derivative work of copyrighted material that I did not have the
rights to. He said he needed to do some checking (lawyers?). Eventually he
said they would host the PDFs, as it was their property, but would give me
full credit for producing it. And once it was freely available on their site,
anyone, including myself, could host copies. I provided Dennis with all the
added files and all the modified versions of their files, the new run shell and
sed scripts and even the awk postscript pre-distiller fixer script. He (or
Lucent) declined not put them up along side the PDFs, for whatever reason,
and since they were not providing them, I was not to give out those files
either.  Only files I made myself or the files I found that were all ready
available by Lucent (such as the missing headers) were OK for me to host too.
This is that v7add.tar.gz file you found, that I only hosted.

I also decided (and I told Dennis) I was going to make it so I could identify
the PDF files that was my work. In volume 2B, I fixed the typo "oe" to "one"
on the RATFOR paper, and I figured no one is going to put in a typo back in.
In volume 2A on the "UNIX Programming" page I left the .ND macro as is so
it would print the date it was troff'd (December 3, 1998).

I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th Edition C Reference Manual
in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is
the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could
provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I
was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it.

I was going to do something similar to volume 1, but I forgot to do it
before that December 3rd run and it got sent to Dennis without a change.
And I was not going to tell Dennis and say hey pull that one down and put
this one up, thanks. Too late is simply too late.

That at some point after they had been out for a while I noticed Dennis added
gzipped postscript versions of them, and credited it to Aharon Robbins, who
still posts here. I was upset at first, as it looked like half the credit was
going to someone who did a print to file and then ran gzip on it.  And second,
the point of the PDF was so it could print anywhere, those cannot.  Anyway
I got over it, as none it was mine to start with. And most would probably
use the PDF anyway.

Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the PDFs too, in 1999 or
2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them
and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but
I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not.
This work is truly lost.

The next, and last, time I saw Dennis was at the 2000 Summer USENIX in San
Diego. I just thought it was funny the looks I got from people when he came
up to me to say hello.

-Brian

Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>
> > My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications
> > colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq
> > special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by
> > Bell Labs,
>
> I disagree.  While the "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual" document proves
> that \(sq was hollow in all 3 fonts _as of 1976-10-11_ (the original
> date of this doc), bwk's document from 1978-08-04 indicates that this
> char had to have changed to a filled square by this date.  However,
> troff in 1978 was still completely, utterly incapable of driving
> anything other than a C/A/T!  Now bwk, the author of this doc, is the
> very same fine gentleman who wrote ditroff, the creature that was
> finally capable of driving a Linotron 202 or Autologic APS-5 or
> whatever - but the timeline does not match up.  BWK's troff tutorial
> is dated 1978-08-04, but his work on ditroff (as I understand it)
> happened some time around 1980 or 1981.  He may have started ditroff
> work in 1979, but definitely not in 1978.
>
> > but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5.
>
> 4.3BSD Usenix books prove otherwise: these must have been troffed on
> APS-5, as many notes from that time attest, but they feature hollow
> square in bold.  Even eqnchar(7) is "wrong" in 4.3BSD print in that
> "blot" is a hollow square, clearly counter to original intent of that
> named eqn character.
>
> > I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page,
>
> Ahh, so you are involved with groff - got it.  I wrote my own version
> of troff (based on V7, running under 4.3BSD and directly emitting
> DSC-conforming PostScript) in 3 "bursts" of work around 2004, 2010 and
> 2012, but I never got around to releasing it.  I am now in the process
> of cleaning it up for release, hoping to finally have it out in another
> week or two.  And I put a _lot_ of work into replicating the original
> troff character set...
>
> > Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that
> > the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition
>
> Thank you for clarifying what HRW is - so this 1983 version of 7th ed
> UPM is *not* the original?
>
> > > What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
> > > book?
> >
> > The HRW copies I have are perfect bound.  But I can't remember if they
> > were 3-hole punched as well.
>
> Thank you for the clarification!  But if HRW version is not the
> original, then what was the original like?
>
> > Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of
> > the V7 Volume 2 manual?
>
> https://plan9.io/7thEdMan/bswv7.html
> http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/
>
> The second page includes a link to this tarball:
>
> http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/v7add.tar.gz
>
> Dates inside that tarball are 1998-12-13.  There was also a place
> where Brian missed the retroffing date - see page 287 of his
> v7vol2a.pdf.
>
> > I have wondered about this for years.  In part
> > to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the
> > original, it is not perfect,
>
> What _I_ don't like about BSW's PDF rendition of V7 manuals is that it
> is a sort of "closed source" product: there is no published source
> package that retraces every step in the flow from ancient troff sources
> to the finished product.
>
> In the same 3 "bursts" of activity (2004, 2010 and 2012) when I worked
> on my own version of troff, I also worked toward doing a PostScript
> reprint of 4.3BSD Usenix books.  4.3BSD happens to be my personally
> preferred version of UNIX, but the same methods I use for 4.3BSD books
> can also be applied to V7.  I am hoping that in the next week or two I
> will find time to release not only my version of troff, but also the
> partial set of 4.3BSD books I got done so far.
>
> Out of the 7 books that comprise 4.3BSD Usenix set, the breakdown is
> as follows:
>
> * URM, PRM and USD: I got these done already, only need to write new
> colophons to be added to the end of each book.  These are the ones I
> am hoping to put out Real Soon Now.
>
> * PS1, PS2 and SMM remain to be worked on, but are part of my more
> distant plans.
>
> * The "Master Index" volume, I plan to skip that one - too difficult,
> and non-essential in my view.
>
> And yes, I am much more "perfectionist" about replicating troff details
> than BSW was for his V7 PDF version.
>
> M~
>