Research UNIX: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986 [pdf]

archive.org

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My scan of the print edition (kindly mailed to me many years ago by Doug McIlroy), which includes the historical manpages as well as the commentary: https://archive.org/details/research-unix-reader/

Thank you so much for sharing!

Pipe written in a night. The good old days.

Or nights.

Since the beginning you could `echo hello | mail user@host.com`

Not entirely true, but almost! The DNS hierarchy didn't exist until a (very) late version of UNIX, and if I remember right, most mail used ! instead of @ and .

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing

In fact, user@host didn't need the internet or uucp.

Even without sendmail rewriting, some systems (e.g. MHSnet/ACSNET) used `@` natively IIRC.

Thank you for expanding!

This is just the intro. The full document is available at https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader/ .

Oh shoot, I knew in my search for a link I could share this at (my own digital copy is of less than perfect quality, and is in a format that doesn't allow viewing inside of WWW browsers, so I just picked the one from McIllroy's site) I had missed something. Yeah, absolutely check the fully copy, it's pretty fantastic.

Sending a message to hn@yc to try and get the link changed.

Ok, we've changed from http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf.

i'm glad someone appreciates this.

some people at cat-v.org were interested in this and there happened to be a copy at stanford library where a roommate of mine was working at the time. he borrowed it on my behalf and i used the book scanner at noisebridge in san francisco (constructed from wood and two canon cameras and a python script) to image it, and uploaded it to archive.org.

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