[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual?

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Thanks for this history Brian.

It was a long time ago, but I think all I did was figure out how
to turn the PDF back into postscript, since I had a postscript printer
at the time and it was easier for me to print postscript.

I sent the files to Dennis _only_ with the thought that they might be
useful to other people, and certainly with no intent to steal any credit.

Your files were great; I printed out hardcopy at the time and
still have them on a shelf in my basement.

Thanks!

Arnold

Brian Walden <tuhs at cuzuco.com> wrote:

> 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~
> >