[TUHS] Unix V10 Volume 2 PDFs

[Rob Pike]

Doug was part of the story but the 10th edition manual was mostly my effort
to herd the cats into production, including finding and working with the
publisher.

-rob


On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 12:52 PM Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:

> For the non-TUHS folks who don't know me, I worked in
> Center 1127 (the Bell Labs Computing Science Research
> Center) 1984-1990, and had some hand in 9th and 10th
> Edition Manuals and what passed for the V8-V10
> `distributions.'
>
> To answer Branden's points:
>
> A.  I do know what version of troff was used to typeset
> the 8th through 10th Edition manuals.  It was the version
> we were using in 1127 at the time, which was indeed
> Kernighan's.  The macro packages probably matter more
> than the particular troff edition.
>
> For the 10th Edition (which files I have at hand), there
> was an individual mkfile (mk(1)) for each paper, so
> in principle there was no fixed formatting package,
> but in practice everything appears to have used troff -mpm,
> with various preprocessors according the paper: prefer,
> tbl, pic, ideal, and in some cases additional macros and even
> odds and ends of sed and awk.
>
> If you wanted to re-render things from scratch you'd
> want all the tools.  But if you have the real troff
> sources you'll have all the mkfiles--things were stored
> one paper per directory.
>
> -mpm (mpm(6) in 10/e vol 1) was a largely ms-compatible
> package with special expertise in page layout.
>
> B.  There was no such thing as a `release' after V7.
> In fall 1984 we made a single V8 snapshot.  Making
> that involved a lot of fiddly work, because we didn't
> normally try to build systems from scratch; when we
> brought in a new computer we cloned it from an existing
> one.  So there was lots of fiddly work to make sure
> every program in /bin and /usr/bin on the tape compiled
> correctly from the source code that would be on the tape
> when the cc and as and ld and libraries on the tape were
> used.
>
> We sent V8 tapes to about a dozen external places, few
> of which did anything with it (many probably never even
> installed it).  Which makes sense, by then we really
> weren't a central source for Unix even within AT&T, let
> alone to the world.  Neither did we want the support
> burden that would have carried--the group's charter was
> research, after all, not software support.  So the 9th
> and 10th editions existed as manuals, but not as releases.
> We did occasionally make one-off snapshots for other parts
> of AT&T, and maybe for a university or two.  (I definitely
> remember taking a snapshot to help the official AT&T System N
> Unix people set up a Research system at one point, and have
> a vague memory that I may have carried a tape to a university
> under a special one-off license letter.)
>
> On the other hand, troff wasn't a rapid moving target, and
> unlike the stars of the modern software world, we tried not
> to break things unless there was a real reason to do so.
> So I suspect the troff from any system of that era would
> render the Volume 2 papers properly, and am all but certain
> the 10th-edition-era troff would do so even for older manuals.
>
> C.  Just to be clear, the official 10th Edition manuals
> published by Saunders College Publishing were made from
> camera-ready copy prepared by us in 1127 (Doug McIlroy
> did all the final work, I think) and printed on our
> phototypesetter.  We didn't ship them troff source, nor
> even Postscript.  We did everything including the tables
> of contents and indexes and page numbering.
>
> D.  troff is indeed not TeX, and some of us think of that
> as a feature, not a bug.
>
> I think the odds are fairly good (but not 100%) that
> groff would do a reasonable job of rendering the papers;
> as I said, the hard part is the macro packages.  I'm
> not sure -mpm ever made it out of Research.
>
> And there are probably copyright issues not just with
> the software but with the papers themselves.  The published
> manuals bear a copyright notice, after all.
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
> (A much nicer place than suburban NJ, which is why
> I left the Labs when I did)
>
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