/sys/doc/ Documentation archive

Unix Tenth Edition Manual


This is a start at making available some of the material from the Tenth Edition Research Unix manual. It was the final Unix manual prepared by us, published in 1990 by Saunders College Publishing, in two volumes:

Although the work has many authors, the primary editors, collators, and preparers of the edition were Andrew Hume and Doug McIlroy. They did the work to put the publication together, and their names are with justification signed below the Preface. Preserved records of the publication are in generally good shape, including quantities of printable PostScript, some distilled into PDF here.

The papers here reproduced will generally bear the page numbers as they appeared in the books.

This page will never attempt to reproduce the entire two volumes, but does sample some of its material. Many of the medium-size tool programs (and their documentation) survived into the Plan 9 system, and are described in its programmer's manual and its own collection of papers. Of course some form part of a standard Unix toolset, and are readily available in some form, either on commercial Unix systems, or via independent implementations of their ideas distributed as open-source software. Others of these programs are no longer used, and their documentation will be curated mainly as historical interest dictates.

Priority will be given to papers about programs that are available in Plan 9, but are described only in summary in its manual pages.

The Tenth Edition Research Unix System did boast this published manual, but the software itself was never collected in a single place as a distribution. It was used in the Computing Sciences research group at Bell Labs as a resource through the last of our Vax machines, but not ported en masse to other hardware, nor put on a tape and sent outside the company (or for that matter inside).


Documents from Volume 2:


This page is Copyright © 2000 Lucent Technologies. All rights reserved.

AT&T and Lucent Technologies retain copyright on the material referenced herein, and likewise reserve all rights.


Last fiddled: February, 2001