[TUHS] Acquired 4 Binders of early 80s ESS/SCCS UNIX Manuals

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, May 19th, 2026 at 10:12, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Another exciting find, in the mail currently but will hit my scanner when it arrives.  Managed to land 4 binders from the early 80s that appear to contain Pidents and various other OSDD documents pertaining to the No. 2 Switching Control Center System and ESS-related UNIX (and possibly ESS-CC sources) listings.

Following up that these have now arrived.  One binder is a number of PR documents, in other words, complete source to the following 1981 Issue of No. 2 SCCS utilities:

occ (Old/PDP-11 cc)
sacopy
sed
sh (Bourne)
tp
nroff
nroff fonts

Another binder, although not labeled a PR binder, has sources to awk, bc, and a few other bits.  Unfortunately between them the whole standard UNIX userspace is not there, but part is at least.

Two more of the binders contain the /usr/sccbin scripts and sources, so the meat of the Switching Control Center System userland.  Among some of the more intriguing scripts are one to lock/unlock doors in one of the facilities and some directory scripts containing personnel lists.

Finally, one more binder was added to the mix which contains, among other things, manual pages and scripts related to the Polaris 4.0 database.  I believe this to be some internal AT&T thing with no relation to other products called Polaris but I haven't done much research yet.

Anywho, some significant findings from some cursory glances:

- There are a mishmash of scripts, some targeting the Bourne shell, others targeting the "SCC Shell" which appears to describe a descendent of the shell most recently preserved in USG PG3.  Given the nomenclature and flow of ideas (for instance these scripts use >% for stderr redirect, similar to the % redirect seen in early USG releases), I now am suspicious of whether this shell variant should be called the USG or SCC shell, whether USG modified it first and tossed it over at SCC or if SCC wrote the mods and USG sampled that.

- A /dev listing is given, listing no tty(xx) files, but plenty of ln(xx) entries.  Additionally, references are made to /etc/lines, so this follows in the init and terminal traditions currently seen earliest in 1977's PG3.  This, I suspect, is an SCC invention that rolled into PG3 and CB-UNIX.  In fact, many Program Generic differences with research appear to be Columbus/SCC influenced.

This is a lot of material, almost all fanfold terminal output, so will take a little while to scan.  What I may do in the meantime, at least for the PRs, is nab some extant sources and just "patch" them to the No. 2 SCC version to document changes.

Hopefully 2026 continues to be the year of cracking open USG and Columbus UNIX activities.

- Matt G.