Unix

Text Processing

I spent quite a bit of time working on that BSD UNIX system at BGSU, as it was the only way to print to the Imagen 8/300 laser printer! It was an early Canon engine, but I’m not certain what page description languages it supported. I wrote most of my documentation on the VAX, using vi to edit the text, and troff (actually it was ditroff) to process the output. One of the manuals that I prepared was a guide to all of the computing facilities on campus, including many tables, so I used the tbl and eqn packages from the “Documenters Workbench” as preprocessors. Unix Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly, was published by Hayden Books in 1987, back when O’Reilly & Associates wrote technical documentation for hire. Hayden later took the book out of print, but Dale and Tim retained the copyright and have decided to make it available through their web site under Creative Commons’ Attribution License. It’s available through O’Reilly & Associates Open Books project as a PDF of scanned images (about 27Mb.) of the original document. Some members of the groff mailing list have transcribed the document back into its original source, with the intention of updating the material. They have posted the source, along with PostScript and PDF versions on Larry Koller’s website. I’m also interested in DocBook, a standard generalized markup language (SGML) system for text processing that can produce output for HTML and printed output like RTF or PDF from […]

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UNIX

My first exposure to UNIX was in college at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), where I worked for the University Computer Services department as a student Documentation Assistant. We had a DEC VAX 11/785 that was running 4.2 BSD. While I was there, it was upgraded to 4.3 BSD, and then to DEC Ultrix. The first set of Ultrix manuals that we received were the same as the 4.3 BSD set, except for the cover! Even the footer on every page still said 4.3 BSD! My favorite operating systems are all derived from UNIX. Like the VAX that was running the original Berkeley distributions, FreeBSD is based on the same source code. Mac OS X is actually based on the FreeBSD kernel, combined with the Mach micro-kernel. I also like Linux, which is an independently written kernel based on UNIX design principles. FreeBSD and Linux Since my first experiences with UNIX were with BSD, and Mac OS X is based on BSD UNIX, I have also developed an interest in the open-source operating system FreeBSD. I’m running on a home-built machine at home (I refuse to refer to this as a PC as this has too many negative connotations!) that I assembled myself. I’d been tracking FreeBSD 5.3-CURRENT for some time, as I’m using a serial ATA hard drive that wasn’t supported in the 4.9-STABLE branch. Right now I’m running Ubuntu. I’ve also got an aging Dell laptop with a couple of interchangeable hard drives. One of the drives has

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