[TUHS] Looking for a copy of Dennis's original standard I/O library paper from 1977

[Thalia Archibald via TUHS]

On May 8, 2026, at 13:23, Clem Cole wrote:
> All the recent discussion about the original of the B Programming Language,
> PG UNIX, UNIX/TS, et al, got me thinking of something else that so far has
> been lost to time.  In 1977, Dennis published a Bell Laboratories internal
> memorandum entitled: "*A New Input-Output **Package*," which described libS.
> a for the then-current Sixth Edition.  This is also the time frame of USG's
> work on Program Generic UNIX and what would be called UNIX/TS 1.0. The contents
> of this paper were rewritten to become Chapter 7 of K&R1 (including on page
> 144, discussion of -lS needed to be included at compile/link time).
> 
> I would like to add a copy of the original paper to the TUHS archives, but
> I have been unable to find one so far.  The one place I thought I might
> have one, I recently examined and was disappointed to find I had not kept that
> from my CMU days.

This reminds me of Mike Leak’s portable C library, the immediate ancestor of
stdio. There appear to be at least three revisions of the paper:

- 1973: cited by https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist.pdf
- 1975-05-16: https://archive.org/details/ThePortableCLibrary_May75
- 1975-06-27: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/doc/iolib/iolib

The 1973 version is not archived, but Mike could be emailed.

Discussion, including an answer of yours:
    https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/25471/where-is-mike-lesks-circa-1973-portable-i-o-package-for-c

Thalia