Re: Draft v2: London and Reiser's UNIX/32V paper, reconstructed

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Oliver & Larry,

At 2024-06-12T17:02:22+0200, Oliver Corff via wrote:
> thank you very much for this effort.

My pleasure--if I can call it a pleasure to discover defects in groff's
mm package scrambling out like roaches when the light's turned on.  :-O

> One question: the appearance of
> your reconstruction is slightly different from the original.

Oh, definitely.  Pixel-perfection is not a goal, and even if it were, I
think it would need to wait for at least a few more revisions.

> Your lines contain approx. 10% more characters, in result a 10-line
> paragraph in the original text is about 9 lines long in the
> reconstruction.

I noticed.  Also I am not certain that:

1.  groff mm and DWB 3.3 mm use the same page margins;
2.  DWB 3.3 mm and PWB (or whatever London & Reiser used) mm use the
    same page margins;

Each of these present challenges for fidelity, particularly the second.

In principle, difficulties can be worked around by setting groff mm
registers that affect these parameters.

> May I assume that reconstruction of appearance was not your primary
> objective?

It was an objective, up to isomorphism^Wfont and margin issues.

> Do we know about the original font metrics?

I personally do not.  Width metrics can be obtained for the fonts used
by DWB 3.3--they're right there in the troff font description files--but
we don't even know what version of the formatting software London and
Reiser used, nor which device they typeset the document that was scanned
and made its way into Ritchie's hands.

These uncertainties pose challenges for a perfect reconstruction.

> What would be the parameters to .S in order to create an exact match?

If the fonts aren't absolutely metrically compatible, this question may
not have an answer.

I won't rule out the fun/misery of fine tuning type size and margins to
reproduce 32vscan.pdf's line and page breaks exactly; I got far closer
to this goal with Kernighan & Cherry than I had even dreamed would be
possible.

But:

Before tackling that objective I think it's important that we iron out
any "macro" issues, in multiple senses.

1.  The macro package needs to behave very nearly identically.  There's
    _some_ wiggle room here; things that don't affect breaking or
    adjustment decisions aren't a big deal.

2.  The document _content_ needs to be correct; no missing or extraneous
    words.  Any solecisms in the original, like crowded ellipsis dots or
    "incorrect" hyphen/minus substitutions, must be preserved.  We can't
    expect A and B to typeset the same if A and B are not equivalent in
    terms of glyph sequences sent to the output driver.

Those two matters can be attacked in parallel and they are where my
focus is right now.

At 2024-06-12T08:16:15-0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> If we're gonna get precise, is the Bell Labs logo still accessable?

I don't know that the Labs per se _had_ a logo.[1]

But Bell did, of course, and if you format the document with DWB 3.3
troff, you get it.

https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/

More precisely, you get the Death Star, not the Wehrmacht helmet.  The
latter is what appears in 32vscan.pdf.

> Be nice to include that.

Did its trademark ever lapse?  Present day AT&T, after numerous M&As, is
a lineal descendant of BellSouth, the absolute worst of the Baby Bells--
the least innovative, the most negligent of research, the worst at
service delivery, the nastiest at customer relations, the most likely to
perpetrate a fraud on the American court system,[2] and the most
rapacious--so naturally the most successful in our meritocratic system.

The logo is consequently not a matter I'm keen to get involved with.
But if my reconstruction makes it trivially easy for someone else to get
a replica of the paper as London and Reiser might have viewed it, with
a correct corporate logo present, I'll be a happy guy.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/

    Scroll down to "History".

[2] "Phrack editor Knight Lightning, aka Craig Neidorf, was arrested,
    charged with fraud and tried before a grand jury for reprinting most
    of a confidential document, known as the E911 document, stolen from
    the Bell South telephone company. Bell South claimed that the
    confidential E911 document contained sensitive information and put
    its value at $80,000. ...

    The case against Mr Neidorf collapsed when it was shown that the
    E911 paper could be ordered by phone from Bell South for only $13."

    
https://web.archive.org/web/20200301210156/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4657265.stm

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