For the non-TUHS folks who don't know me, I worked in Center 1127 (the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center) 1984-1990, and had some hand in 9th and 10th Edition Manuals and what passed for the V8-V10 `distributions.' To answer Branden's points: A. I do know what version of troff was used to typeset the 8th through 10th Edition manuals. It was the version we were using in 1127 at the time, which was indeed Kernighan's. The macro packages probably matter more than the particular troff edition. For the 10th Edition (which files I have at hand), there was an individual mkfile (mk(1)) for each paper, so in principle there was no fixed formatting package, but in practice everything appears to have used troff -mpm, with various preprocessors according the paper: prefer, tbl, pic, ideal, and in some cases additional macros and even odds and ends of sed and awk. If you wanted to re-render things from scratch you'd want all the tools. But if you have the real troff sources you'll have all the mkfiles--things were stored one paper per directory. -mpm (mpm(6) in 10/e vol 1) was a largely ms-compatible package with special expertise in page layout. B. There was no such thing as a `release' after V7. In fall 1984 we made a single V8 snapshot. Making that involved a lot of fiddly work, because we didn't normally try to build systems from scratch; when we brought in a new computer we cloned it from an existing one. So there was lots of fiddly work to make sure every program in /bin and /usr/bin on the tape compiled correctly from the source code that would be on the tape when the cc and as and ld and libraries on the tape were used. We sent V8 tapes to about a dozen external places, few of which did anything with it (many probably never even installed it). Which makes sense, by then we really weren't a central source for Unix even within AT&T, let alone to the world. Neither did we want the support burden that would have carried--the group's charter was research, after all, not software support. So the 9th and 10th editions existed as manuals, but not as releases. We did occasionally make one-off snapshots for other parts of AT&T, and maybe for a university or two. (I definitely remember taking a snapshot to help the official AT&T System N Unix people set up a Research system at one point, and have a vague memory that I may have carried a tape to a university under a special one-off license letter.) On the other hand, troff wasn't a rapid moving target, and unlike the stars of the modern software world, we tried not to break things unless there was a real reason to do so. So I suspect the troff from any system of that era would render the Volume 2 papers properly, and am all but certain the 10th-edition-era troff would do so even for older manuals. C. Just to be clear, the official 10th Edition manuals published by Saunders College Publishing were made from camera-ready copy prepared by us in 1127 (Doug McIlroy did all the final work, I think) and printed on our phototypesetter. We didn't ship them troff source, nor even Postscript. We did everything including the tables of contents and indexes and page numbering. D. troff is indeed not TeX, and some of us think of that as a feature, not a bug. I think the odds are fairly good (but not 100%) that groff would do a reasonable job of rendering the papers; as I said, the hard part is the macro packages. I'm not sure -mpm ever made it out of Research. And there are probably copyright issues not just with the software but with the papers themselves. The published manuals bear a copyright notice, after all. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (A much nicer place than suburban NJ, which is why I left the Labs when I did)
