[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual?

[Brian Walden]

Mychaela Falconia falcon at freecalypso.org wrote:
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> > 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).
>
> You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much more
> "right" than anything from GNU.

I was just tryting to use the tool that would give the path of least
resistance for that troff source. Even between flavors of UNIX
in the 1980s, there were issues getting correctly formatted output
bewteen Documenter's Workbench (DWB) and UCB.

> > 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).
>
> So it is a different ditroff-to-PS chain than psdit from Adobe
> Transcript?  I am not too familiar with the latter, as I ended up
> writing my own troff (derived from V7 version, just published) that
> emits PS directly, but it is my understanding that Back In The Day
> most people used psdit for this type of workflow.

The DWB way of troff to PostScript is --
   $ pic file | tbl | eqn | troff -mm -Tpost | dpost >file.ps
   $ # if you want to print it near the "bird cage" printer, near a famous stair case in MH
   $ i10send -dbirdie -lpost file.ps
   $ # which would eventually call postio for you
   $ postio -l /dev/tty?? file.ps
As this is pre-ethernet time, QMS printers are connected via RS-232
serial lines and postio does the communication to the printer.

You can find dpost at https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/postscript/dpost/dpost.c
(or at https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/dpost/dpost.c )
Looking at the last few lines of https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/postscript/README it is signed,
   Richard Drechsler
   MH 2F-241 x7442
   mhuxa!drexler

Which is that group I mentioned. Rich wrote dpost for sure, also if you
look at the last person thanked in the Preface of The C programming
Language, Second Edition (1988) --
    Rich Drechsler helped greatly with typesetting.

On a sad side note, Carmela L'Hommedieu, I was going to say "recently," but
it's been almost four years now, who also worked in that group, has passed
    https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/10822663/Carmela-Scrocca-LHommedieu

>
> > 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.
>
> Ouch, until you pointed it out in this ML post, I hadn't even noticed
> that the C Reference Manual doc is "wrong" in your PDF version!  But
> here comes the really important question: if you once had a PDF reprint
> with the "right" version of this doc, where did you get the troff
> source for it?  This is the source that was actually censored from the
> V7 tape:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cman

Yes that is the missing C Reference Manual. I was gifted the troff source
for it, and unfortunately I do not have that gifted copy anymore.

>
> I don't have this problem for my 4.3BSD reprint: the source for 4.3BSD
> version of this doc is included on the tape; the corresponding SCCS
> log begins with "document received from AT&T", checked in on 86/05/14,
> and then revised by BSD people into what they wanted printed in their
> version of the manual.  But if someone wishes to do a *proper* reprint
> of the V7 manual (or 4.2BSD, where this doc and many others were
> literally unchanged duplications from V7 master at the plate level),
> we need the troff source for the V7 version of this doc.
>
> If this source is totally lost, we as in community can probably do an
> OCR from a surviving scan (for example, the one in 4.2BSD PSD book)
> and then painstakingly produce a new troff source that would format
> into an exact replica - but if there is a leaked copy of the original
> source somewhere, it would certainly make our job way easier.
>
> > 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.
>
> Aside from the unresolved issue of "cman" document, we as in community
> can produce an even better work if we so wish.  I am deferring a more
> detailed discussion until I put out my 4.3BSD PS reprint, so I can
> point to it as a reference for how I like to do things, and maybe by
> then we'll have some clarity on what happened to V7 "cman" troff source.

You will need to check on the legality of that. It is missing because
it was published as Appendix A of the first edition of The C Programming
Language in 1978 by Prentice-Hall, which means they (not Bell Labs, nor
successor compaies, AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia) contractually own the
rights to it for some period of time. I you read Dennis' old home page at
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ you'll see this verbage --

    "The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System''. For completeness, there are also versions of Kernighan's tutorial on C, in Postscript or PDF format.

    There is also a slightly earlier (January 1974) version of the C manual, in the form of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum, visible here, if you can accommodate 1.9MB.

    No updated version of this manual was distributed with most machine readable versions of the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time. The tutorial was greatly expanded into the bulk of the book, and the manual became the book's Appendix A.

    However, it turns out that the paper copies of the 7th Edition manual that we printed locally include not only what became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled "Recent Changes to C", and I retyped this. I haven't been able to track down the contemporary machine-readable version (it's possible that some tapes were produced that included it). This is available in PostScript or PDF format."

As we know from the recent public domaining of Mickey Mouse, copyright
is retained 70 years past the date of death of the (last surviving)
author. So if Brian Kernighan lives to the ripe old age of 101, this
work cannot be used without permisson until 2113, unless the rights
holders place it into the public domian before hand. Since the 1st
edition is out of print, it's rights *may* have reverted back,
but to which companies?  Probabaly Nokia and AT&T jointy. But there
is no way to know if you can use it, without an official notice of such.

-Brian