7 ms·

Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual

209 points by hobo_mark 9y ago

scoot 9y ago
"The number of UNIX installations is now above 20, and many more are expected." Understatement of the year, 1973.
- qntty 9y ago
  I wouldn't mind living in a time when an engineer could make a living supporting 20 users. (Or maybe you still can?)
  - Anticapitalist 9y ago
    That's 20 installations, not 20 users. In early computing many users would share the same computer.
    - Sirened 9y ago
      And now, (un?)fortunately, we have to support users and their creative ways of breaking things across many devices. A bright future for IT!
      - AckSyn 9y ago
        BYOD in a nutshell. The bane of any sane sysadmin.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Nice pick :) Added to http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
  - Bromskloss 9y ago
    I don't use `gem`. Are these available in a format other than hardcoded into the source code?
    - contingencies 9y ago
      https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86ac1faa341c https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86...
emmelaich 9y ago
As Diomidis says, the language is wonderfully clear; for example see the sentence on grep's -v option. Nice also to see the permuted index and BUGS sections. Lastly, wonderfully literate. Finding things like hapax legomena is great.
dfabulich 9y ago
> The text of the manual was written using the ed text editor. I guess I should have known, but I had no idea that anyone had written a 50,000-word 300-page manual in ed. It has a bit of a, uh, reputation. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt
- Hextinium 9y ago
  I always find all the old programming humor some of the funniest stuff around and people will look at me and ask what are you laughing about but the humor is always lost on them.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs Yeah, now I want to see he talking about GNU ls and the -h option.
- RGS1811 9y ago
  The bit about error reporting was the best part. > Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
  - xelxebar 9y ago
    ?
    - dijit 9y ago
      Ed will error a lot and not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored
      - taejo 9y ago
        > not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored i.e., ?
- Koshkin 9y ago
Nicholas7900 9y ago
COMPOSITE HACKS • If Truly you Are In Need Of A PROFESSIONAL HACKER Who Will Get Your Job Done Efficiently With Swift Response, You Have Met the Right Person. MOTIVE: • I don't care who you are, The reason why I am hired is to simply get the job done however, I engage in"silent" attacks so the target remains unaware of the hack. MY HACKING CAPABILITIES: There are series of people who needs to Hack their target email I.D, social media websites,apps or smartphones, for many reasons such as husband cheating on wife, girlfriend cheating on boyfriend or vice versa. Or important information needed to be dumped/sniffed from the target email address, website, a particular location, or for whatsoever reason you want to hire a Hacker Or As a parent you might need to monitor what your children are doing on social media and on their personal computers so that they don’t get into trouble. Or if you want to hack a private domain email account(business email), or you want to eraze your name from court’s criminal records, perhaps you might want to Hack into the database of any government agency, All these are what I can get done within few hours. Frankly speaking, I always give a 100% guarantee on any job I am been asked to do, because I have always been successful in Almost all my jobs for the past 10years and my clients can testify to that . To hack anything needs time though, but I can provide a swift response to your job depending on how fast and urgent you need. Time also depends on what exactly you want to hack and how serious you are. Enough time with social engineering is required for hacking. So if you want to bind me in a short time, then just don't contact me because I can't hack within one hour,sorry. Basically, time depends on your luck. If its good luck, then it is possible to hack within one hour but, if its in the other way round, it would take few hours. I have seen FAKE HACKERS claiming they can hack in 1hr , but there is no REAL HACKER who can say this (AVOID THEM). If your target account is Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, sexual accounts or other social accounts, Bitcoin wallets, etc, or you want to hack into someones smartphone so you can monitor their calls, read their messages, chats, and social account activities without their notice, Or you wana track someone’s location, Or you want to retrieve lost files,messages, feel free to contact me, we would have a nice deal! I will explain to you how I am going to get the job done. You can also contact me for other Cyber Attacks And Hijackings, i do almost All CONTACT: compositehacks@gmail.com
davidwihl 9y ago
I fondly have paper copies of Vol I and Vol II on my shelf next to the Multics book. The PDF referred by the above seems to be only one volume, with command references not the technical papers.
- enf 9y ago
  You may be interested in the similar process I went through in 1997 to make a PDF of the Sixth Edition manual, including the papers: https://github.com/ericfischer/v6man/ https://github.com/ericfischer/v6man/ The files for the Fourth Edition papers did not survive, only what is what is archived at ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixArchive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v4/
sverige 9y ago
This was an update of the previous edition because of the many changes that had been made in the intervening months. They went at a torrid pace for a few years there. It's amazing how much they got so right in design philosophy. And of course I'm a huge fan of the readability of their documentation. All documentation should be this good.
scoot 9y ago
I was amazed to see speech synthesis (speak / vs) as a standard feature. A little googling lead me to this: "Donald Sherman orders a pizza using a talking computer, Dec 4, 1974"[1] I seem to have a personal difficulty imagining the level of sophistication that existed prior my own awareness a particular technology; in the same way that it might sometimes appear that before color photography, the world was black-and-white. I'm grateful to the technology archaeologist who set the record straight. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA
- enf 9y ago
  The paper about the Unix speech implementation: https://archive.org/details/synthetic-english-speech https://archive.org/details/synthetic-english-speech
- flukus 9y ago
  I'm not sure if the tech is under developed or whether we just hit a local maximum, but in the 80's I would have thought that we'd be free of the need for voice actors before we got CG actors. During the 90's the exact opposite happened, we got fully CG movies but still needed humans for the vocals. It's also amusing that we discovered it wasn't a compelling means of user interaction 20-30 years before siri.
  - Someone 9y ago
    …when you’re sitting next to a keyboard, quality is on the “I’m surprised it works at all” level, and when speech recognizers do not really exist (it was at least a decade later that we had ones that had to be trained for hundreds of hours for each speaker, and still were bad when there was background noise) Nowadays, I think speech interaction has its place. If we get butler-level AI (where the machine knows what you want without you even telling it what you think you want), it will get away again, but that’s a big if.
  - gugagore 9y ago
    That is interesting. As far as I know, all human-realistic CG actors are controlled by human actors, though. Kind of how an artist can take human voices and morph them into other voices for characters.
ilaksh 9y ago
Is there an emulator that can run this version of Unix and ideally has the software available?
- supergarfield 9y ago
  SIMH is a good emulator for 70s-80s minicomputers. The Unix heritage society (TUHS) has a lot of software, including early Unices, at their Unix archive. Some of it is a little tricky to get to work, but v6 and v7 Unix both work like charms in my experience. Look at http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Boot_Images/ http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Boot_Images/ for software (you have to look around in the readmes a little). Debian and Ubuntu both have SIMH packages. Edit: This article (https://connect.ed-diamond.com/GNU-Linux-Magazine/GLMF-102/88-miles-a-l-heure https://connect.ed-diamond.com/GNU-Linux-Magazine/GLMF-102/8...) explains how to run some of these old Unices, and the author also builds and uses an IRC client on 2.11BSD. It's written in French, but Google translate does an OK job on it.
- em500 9y ago
  Here's a web emulator of Unix V6 (which is slightly newer than the version in the Unix manual, but probably primitive enough to satisfy the curious): http://pdp11.aiju.de/ http://pdp11.aiju.de/
Tempest1981 9y ago
From the manual: Logging out. There are three ways to log out: 1) You can simply hang up the phone.
linschn 9y ago
As highlighted on TUHS maling list: > When you type to UNIX,a gnome deep in the system is gathering your characters and saving them in a secret place. The characters will not be given to a program until you type a return (or new-line), as described above in Logging in.
igtztorrero 9y ago
So this is where all come from. I can't belive I'm using 1973 commands.

209 points by hobo_mark 9y ago

scoot 9y ago

"The number of UNIX installations is now above 20, and many more are expected." Understatement of the year, 1973.

qntty 9y ago
I wouldn't mind living in a time when an engineer could make a living supporting 20 users. (Or maybe you still can?)
- Anticapitalist 9y ago
  That's 20 installations, not 20 users. In early computing many users would share the same computer.
  - Sirened 9y ago
    And now, (un?)fortunately, we have to support users and their creative ways of breaking things across many devices. A bright future for IT!
    - AckSyn 9y ago
      BYOD in a nutshell. The bane of any sane sysadmin.
contingencies 9y ago
Nice pick :) Added to http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  I don't use `gem`. Are these available in a format other than hardcoded into the source code?
  - contingencies 9y ago
    https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86ac1faa341c https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86...

emmelaich 9y ago

As Diomidis says, the language is wonderfully clear; for example see the sentence on grep's -v option. Nice also to see the permuted index and BUGS sections. Lastly, wonderfully literate. Finding things like hapax legomena is great.

dfabulich 9y ago

> The text of the manual was written using the ed text editor. I guess I should have known, but I had no idea that anyone had written a 50,000-word 300-page manual in ed. It has a bit of a, uh, reputation. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

Hextinium 9y ago
I always find all the old programming humor some of the funniest stuff around and people will look at me and ask what are you laughing about but the humor is always lost on them.
marcosdumay 9y ago
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs Yeah, now I want to see he talking about GNU ls and the -h option.
RGS1811 9y ago
The bit about error reporting was the best part. > Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  ?
  - dijit 9y ago
    Ed will error a lot and not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored
    - taejo 9y ago
      > not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored i.e., ?
Koshkin 9y ago

Nicholas7900 9y ago

COMPOSITE HACKS • If Truly you Are In Need Of A PROFESSIONAL HACKER Who Will Get Your Job Done Efficiently With Swift Response, You Have Met the Right Person. MOTIVE: • I don't care who you are, The reason why I am hired is to simply get the job done however, I engage in"silent" attacks so the target remains unaware of the hack. MY HACKING CAPABILITIES: There are series of people who needs to Hack their target email I.D, social media websites,apps or smartphones, for many reasons such as husband cheating on wife, girlfriend cheating on boyfriend or vice versa. Or important information needed to be dumped/sniffed from the target email address, website, a particular location, or for whatsoever reason you want to hire a Hacker Or As a parent you might need to monitor what your children are doing on social media and on their personal computers so that they don’t get into trouble. Or if you want to hack a private domain email account(business email), or you want to eraze your name from court’s criminal records, perhaps you might want to Hack into the database of any government agency, All these are what I can get done within few hours. Frankly speaking, I always give a 100% guarantee on any job I am been asked to do, because I have always been successful in Almost all my jobs for the past 10years and my clients can testify to that . To hack anything needs time though, but I can provide a swift response to your job depending on how fast and urgent you need. Time also depends on what exactly you want to hack and how serious you are. Enough time with social engineering is required for hacking. So if you want to bind me in a short time, then just don't contact me because I can't hack within one hour,sorry. Basically, time depends on your luck. If its good luck, then it is possible to hack within one hour but, if its in the other way round, it would take few hours. I have seen FAKE HACKERS claiming they can hack in 1hr , but there is no REAL HACKER who can say this (AVOID THEM). If your target account is Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, sexual accounts or other social accounts, Bitcoin wallets, etc, or you want to hack into someones smartphone so you can monitor their calls, read their messages, chats, and social account activities without their notice, Or you wana track someone’s location, Or you want to retrieve lost files,messages, feel free to contact me, we would have a nice deal! I will explain to you how I am going to get the job done. You can also contact me for other Cyber Attacks And Hijackings, i do almost All CONTACT: compositehacks@gmail.com

davidwihl 9y ago

I fondly have paper copies of Vol I and Vol II on my shelf next to the Multics book. The PDF referred by the above seems to be only one volume, with command references not the technical papers.

enf 9y ago
You may be interested in the similar process I went through in 1997 to make a PDF of the Sixth Edition manual, including the papers: https://github.com/ericfischer/v6man/ https://github.com/ericfischer/v6man/ The files for the Fourth Edition papers did not survive, only what is what is archived at ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixArchive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v4/

sverige 9y ago

This was an update of the previous edition because of the many changes that had been made in the intervening months. They went at a torrid pace for a few years there. It's amazing how much they got so right in design philosophy. And of course I'm a huge fan of the readability of their documentation. All documentation should be this good.

scoot 9y ago

I was amazed to see speech synthesis (speak / vs) as a standard feature. A little googling lead me to this: "Donald Sherman orders a pizza using a talking computer, Dec 4, 1974"[1] I seem to have a personal difficulty imagining the level of sophistication that existed prior my own awareness a particular technology; in the same way that it might sometimes appear that before color photography, the world was black-and-white. I'm grateful to the technology archaeologist who set the record straight. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA

enf 9y ago
The paper about the Unix speech implementation: https://archive.org/details/synthetic-english-speech https://archive.org/details/synthetic-english-speech
flukus 9y ago
I'm not sure if the tech is under developed or whether we just hit a local maximum, but in the 80's I would have thought that we'd be free of the need for voice actors before we got CG actors. During the 90's the exact opposite happened, we got fully CG movies but still needed humans for the vocals. It's also amusing that we discovered it wasn't a compelling means of user interaction 20-30 years before siri.
- Someone 9y ago
  …when you’re sitting next to a keyboard, quality is on the “I’m surprised it works at all” level, and when speech recognizers do not really exist (it was at least a decade later that we had ones that had to be trained for hundreds of hours for each speaker, and still were bad when there was background noise) Nowadays, I think speech interaction has its place. If we get butler-level AI (where the machine knows what you want without you even telling it what you think you want), it will get away again, but that’s a big if.
- gugagore 9y ago
  That is interesting. As far as I know, all human-realistic CG actors are controlled by human actors, though. Kind of how an artist can take human voices and morph them into other voices for characters.

ilaksh 9y ago

Is there an emulator that can run this version of Unix and ideally has the software available?

supergarfield 9y ago
SIMH is a good emulator for 70s-80s minicomputers. The Unix heritage society (TUHS) has a lot of software, including early Unices, at their Unix archive. Some of it is a little tricky to get to work, but v6 and v7 Unix both work like charms in my experience. Look at http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Boot_Images/ http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Boot_Images/ for software (you have to look around in the readmes a little). Debian and Ubuntu both have SIMH packages. Edit: This article (https://connect.ed-diamond.com/GNU-Linux-Magazine/GLMF-102/88-miles-a-l-heure https://connect.ed-diamond.com/GNU-Linux-Magazine/GLMF-102/8...) explains how to run some of these old Unices, and the author also builds and uses an IRC client on 2.11BSD. It's written in French, but Google translate does an OK job on it.
em500 9y ago
Here's a web emulator of Unix V6 (which is slightly newer than the version in the Unix manual, but probably primitive enough to satisfy the curious): http://pdp11.aiju.de/ http://pdp11.aiju.de/

Tempest1981 9y ago

From the manual: Logging out. There are three ways to log out: 1) You can simply hang up the phone.

linschn 9y ago

As highlighted on TUHS maling list: > When you type to UNIX,a gnome deep in the system is gathering your characters and saving them in a secret place. The characters will not be given to a program until you type a return (or new-line), as described above in Logging in.

igtztorrero 9y ago

So this is where all come from. I can't belive I'm using 1973 commands.