Third edition in 1973
Around the time that UNIX was being rewritten in C.
Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#12Downloaded for future RAG / LLM retrieval :)
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#13I love how the "Index" (starting on page 18 of the PDF) doesn't send the reader to page numbers
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
A time when computers were very expensive.
But Unix could run on a cheap PDP-11, within the budget of many departments.
Take a look at the PDP-11 price list from 1973: https://iamvirtual.ca/collection/systems/minis/PDP11-10/PDP1...
Does not look very cheap to me. Please note that $1 of 1973 is approximately $7 of 2024, so prices of usable configurations quickly reach the $100k to $200k territory, with a few grand of monthly upkeep.
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Unix could run on a cheap PDP-11, within the budget of many departments.
Take a look at the PDP-11 price list from 1973: https://iamvirtual.ca/collection/systems/minis/PDP11-10/PDP1... Does not look very cheap to me. Please note that $1 of 1973 is approximately $7 of 2024, so prices of usable configurations quickly reach the $100k to $200k territory, with a few grand of monthly upkeep.
Enterprise gear today can pretty quickly and easily add up to seven digits per rack. At a previous job, I personally handled a specialized network processing card that retailed for over a quarter million dollars.
The PDP-11 seems like a bargain for what was fairly close to cutting edge technology at the time.
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#16It's 30 pages of intro and then -allthemanpages-. I remember a 10-foot-long book at my college for Michigan Terminal System (MTS) because we didn't have UNIX running on the mainframe... i can't remember what UNIX ran on now, it was 1984-1988 at RPI. Anybody remember what UNIX ran on? It wasn't the VAX on the Vorhees building altar.
Go Engineers!
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#17My favorite (and also surprising) old Unix document is an USENIX paper from 1984, describing the /proc filesystem:
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take a look at the PDP-11 price list from 1973: https://iamvirtual.ca/collection/systems/minis/PDP11-10/PDP1... Does not look very cheap to me. Please note that $1 of 1973 is approximately $7 of 2024, so prices of usable configurations quickly reach the $100k to $200k territory, with a few grand of monthly upkeep.
Enterprise gear today can pretty quickly and easily add up to seven digits per rack. At a previous job, I personally handled a specialized network processing card that retailed for over a quarter million dollars. The PDP-11 seems like a bargain for what was fairly close to cutting edge technology at the time.
And most "departments" nowadays won't have a seven-figure racks of hardware. Especially not incredibly arcane hardware that possibly only 100's of people on earth are capable of operating at all, which require you to upgrade your electrical and possibly floors and furthermore are so novel conceptually that one is not even sure what problems would be applicable to it.
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#19I love how the "Index" (starting on page 18 of the PDF) doesn't send the reader to page numbers
Pretty useable though. It's more of a glossary that explains the meaning of the (very short) command names and sends you to the proper Volume (in roman numerals) those are sorted alphabetically.
Considering most users would probably be reading this on a fan paper printout, an index like this was probably quite good ergonomically.
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#20It's 30 pages of intro and then -allthemanpages-. I remember a 10-foot-long book at my college for Michigan Terminal System (MTS) because we didn't have UNIX running on the mainframe... i can't remember what UNIX ran on now, it was 1984-1988 at RPI. Anybody remember what UNIX ran on? It wasn't the VAX on the Vorhees building altar.
PDP-7 (original Bell Labs), PDP-11 (very popular at universities), and VAX-11 (especially VAX-11/780) were popular 1970s/80s Unix hosts.
(Long live kremvax!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax>.)