On Sat, 27 Sep 2025, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hmm--I got an SMTP permanent failure from GMail regarding Dan's address,
> so anyone else wanting to follow up should be advised.
Ack, thank you for pointing this out. The from address should be
dplassche at gmail. Should be corrected now. There may be one
copy of this message stuck in delivery (sorry). An smtp oauth
failure with gmail caused the client to fallback on the system
mailer using my username on one machine.
On Sat, 27 Sep 2025, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Is there a publicly available source for DWB 2.0?
Partially. There's a copy of svr2 source for the ns32000 that
happens to include dwb 2 without attribution or a version date.
Other copies of SVR2 do not, so I usually cross-reference against
releases.
Known binary releases are:
- dwb 1 (1983) in Microport System V/AT (otherwise SVR2 from
1984)
You can extract the text distribution from disks by piping
into cpio or bsdtar after skipping the first 30 512 byte
sectors
- dwb 2 as released on the 3b2 (in simh)
https://archives.loomcom.com/3b2/software/Documenters_Workbench
- dwb "3" as released for Interactive Unix 4.1
PC/IX was Interactive Unix 3.x based on SVR3 from 1987
later 4.x copies still contain macros dated 1987
(/usr/lib/macros/an is vers 1.2 from 19870730)
I have never been able to confirm the existence of text
formatting disks for PC/IX from before Sun acquired
Interactive in 1991
I have media (disks and manuals) along with installations for
both x86 systems above if there's anything else it would help to
check.
> > Softquad and eroff were based on dwb 2.
>
> Thanks for the confirmation!
Yeah, the timeline specific to dwb development from 1986-88 is
really unclear. I think dwb picked up changes from research
selectively, but the cutover from 2-3 and the group initially
working on 3 is hard to determine.
Softquad announces the ATT partnership in 1986. SVR3 appears in
1987 with no bundled dwb. SVR4 ships with a slightly updated dwb2
in 1989. USL dwb 3 is announced by Nils-Peter Nielsen in 1990
for purchase and probably sold mostto SVR3 users (primarily SCO
Unix users not switching to groff or falling back on compat for
Xenix v7 troff).
I was able to see the Softquad manuals at the University of
Toronto archives and have been meaning to put together some notes
on the unique features like the output format.
> Hmm, intriguing! Do you know where I can get at this source? Is it in
> Kirk McKusick's CD-ROMs?
Yep, on Kirk's original CSRG set disc 4 under /local/ditroff.
I'd like to find a release copy of 1981 ditroff for comparison.
> I'm curious to know if it has:
>
> 1. the `lq` and `rq` string definitions; and/or
Only for the me macros, but that appears from 2BSD in 1979 (see
src/me on csrg disc 1).
> 2. the following Eighth Edition macros documented in its man(7):
> a. XE
> b. 1C
> c. 2C
I always though the 1 and 2 column modes were part of MS macros
from v7 onwards. They are local/ditroff (ms.d) and the v7 troff
with BSD updates under /old/roff disc 4. Not seeing .XE
anywhere.
> (I finally got my printed original Eighth Edition manual out of storage
> in Australia![2] Happy days for my historical research.)
Neat, does it have a colphon saying how it was printed? Maybe on
the Linotron 202?
Regards,
Dan
