Unix Bookshelves.....

[lowen]

So, the newbie thread kindof caused me to get interested in another aspect of vintage Unix systems: manuals. Here's a small section of my Unix bookshelf, including two titles that can't be too common; I'd like to see what other gems are out there sitting on others' bookshelves:

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Probably the most interesting thing I have lying around is four volumes from the USENIX distribution documentation for VAX BSD 4.2, from the March 1986 4th printing:



It's basically an older version of these books on archive.org, which are the BSD 4.3 release. (Ironically according to the copyright page it looks like 4.3 came out in November 1986, so technically my books were obsolete eight months after they were printed.) It should be a five volume set, but I'm missing the "System Manager's Manual", alas.

I've also got an older printing of "The Lions' book" around here somewhere, but not a first edition or anything.

 

[resman]

I should probably re-think holding on to these A/UX manuals as they take up a LOT of shelf space!

 

[ScutBoy]

Nice! I have some (but not all) of those Apple A/UX manuals...

 

[agentb]

Thanks to a very generous former AT&T employee, my UNIX PC manual collection grew infinitely yesterday. Wish I still had my old Stevens UNIX programming book I had in college.

 

[jfloren]

I don't have many Unix books, but what I do have is clustered toward the left edge of the shelf. The Emacs manual is from March 1987. Lisp Lore is kind of my favorite, being a compilation of materials from a series of informal sessions at Bell Labs--of course I don't have a Symbolics machine upon which I can apply those lessons (some day!).

 

[lowen]

There HAS to be a story behind "Inferno programming with Limbo."

 

[jfloren]

There HAS to be a story behind "Inferno programming with Limbo."

Inferno is a VM-based operating system developed at Bell Labs. The virtual machine is called Dis, and the language is called Limbo.

Limbo feels like Go, which makes sense because there's a big overlap between the creators of both.

It could have been a Java competitor, but it was poorly marketed. Lucent made a telephone which ran Inferno; not a smartphone, but a landline phone with a small ARM computer built into it, with an address book and a web browser and email client. They didn't sell worth a damn and a Linux dude was able to buy a bunch cheap: http://tuxscreen.sourceforge.net/ http://tuxscreen.sourceforge.net/wiki/view/SomeHistory

As for why I have it? I got interested in Plan 9 in high school, then in college started to experiment with Inferno too. At one point, with the assistance of some interns, I got Inferno running on an Android device, fully replacing the Android UI. We could make calls, send texts, and everything, but funding was limited and I didn't pursue it on my own time.

 

[bifo86]

Any chance that implementation is online or can be shared somewhere?

 

[jfloren]

Inferno on Android, you mean? It's here: https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/commits/

But it only ever worked on two specific devices from 2011, and hasn't been touched since then.

 

[dbarnhart]

I've also got an older printing of "The Lions' book" around here somewhere, but not a first edition or anything.

I've been curious about the older copies of that book. Can you snap a photo of the cover or anything? I'd be really interested to see what it looks like.