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

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

below

On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 4:43 PM Thalia Archibald <thalia at archibald.dev>
wrote:

> 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

I don't think I ever saw this version.

>
> - 1975-05-16: https://archive.org/details/ThePortableCLibrary_May75

Thanks,  I had seen this before and it is the most complete. It talks about
things that he did not discuss in the version packaged with Sixth Edition.
Besides making sure its in the TUHS Document's archives, we need check to
ensure that it does indeed match the code; as well as trying to OCR it and
see if we can recreate a cleaner version like I did with some of the B
stuff from Dennis.

>
> - 1975-06-27:
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/doc/iolib/iolib

While the date is a month later, I suspect that is an artificat of the
packaging of things to create the release and Dennis had grabbed an earlier
verion.

>
>
> The 1973 version is not archived, but Mike could be emailed.
>
Certainly, if only to see what changed.  It would be best if we had both
the earlier version and the code, but I suspect we have lost both to time.
I'll try close the loop with Mike.

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

Yes, and I pointed to the V6  version.   One of my longer term desires is
in the TUHS archives to add a PDF and HTML directories for each release
that has the doc files and man files turned into ODF abnd HTML for better
viewing.   That said Branden Robinson has been super when I have run into
issues when I have tried to make modern rendering with groff of many of
these older docs.

>
>
> Thalia
>