Re: Undocumented systems/standards PWB and 32V

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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Hi Seth,

At 2026-01-01T04:45:28+0000, Seth McDonald wrote:
> Starting the year off strong, here's a classic bug report.  The man
> page for alloca(3) lists two systems/standards in its HISTORY: PWB and
> 32V.
> 
> $ man ./man3/alloca.3 | sed -n '/HISTORY/,/^$/p'
> HISTORY
>        PWB, 32V.
> 
> After some Googling, I assume these are referring to the PWB/UNIX and
> UNIX/32V operating systems, respectively.

Yes.  Most likely.  I have some remarks on nomenclature, orthography,
and history.

PWB stands for "Programmer's Workbench".  It was a flavor of Unix
maintained and sustained outside of the Bell Labs Computing Science
Research Center (CSRC) in Murray Hill, New Jersey.  The CSRC is where
Unix was born and where famous names like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie,
and Brian Kernighan worked.  Eventually, the flavor of Unix produced by
the CSRC came to be known as "Research Unix".  In the late 1980s the
CSRC decided that the Unix system was an unrewarding vehicle for further
_research_, and shifted its emphasis to Plan 9.  Over time, the Jack
Welch-ification of AT&T[1] meant that research at Bell Labs became less
ambitious and eventually halted.

PWB came in at least two revisions--the original, retro-branded PWB1,
and a second, sometimes called "PWB/UNIX 2.0".

Back then, AT&T corporate demanded that full capitals be used to spell
"Unix".  This however was contrary to the preferences of the people who
actually invented and developed it.[2][3]

I'd say, if you want to side with the suits, say "UNIX".

If you want to side with the engineers, say "Unix".

Sources conflict on how to spell "32V".  I've seen it thus but also as
"V32",[4] which may be an error by McIlroy in an otherwise authoritative
source.  If it is an error, it's an understandable one arising from the
naming conventions applied to editions of CSRC Unix, starting with
(again, retrospectively) First Edition in 1971 up through Research Unix
Tenth Edition in 1989.  These were, and still are, often keyed in as
"V1" through "V10" for short, and the "V" spoken as "version".

> However, they aren't listed in the standards(7) man page nor anywhere
> else in the docs.

The first few entries in this document aren't standards; they're more
like convenient _milestones_ from which we can infer a loose
specification.

Plain "PWB" won't do as a standard because, as noted above, it saw at
least two different releases.

Two more remarks on PWB Unix: the system with the best claim to being a
successor of PWB 2.0 is Unix System III (released internally within AT&T
in 1980, but not commercially until--so some sources say--1982.[4]

The reason for the delay would, one supposes, involve the divestiture
of AT&T, that is, its dissolution as a "legal" monopoly, a watershed
event in U.S. commerce.[5]  It's one that was crucially important to
Unix history, because prior to divestiture, AT&T was legally prohibited
from operating commercially as a supplier of computer hardware or
software, per a 1956 consent decree it entered into with the U.S.
federal government.[6]  In practice, AT&T violated the consent decree
with increasing overtness from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s,
marketing Unix System III and then System V as commercial products[7]
and charging ever higher license fees for Unix as software.[8]

"For example, John Lions, a faculty member in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, reported
that his school was able to acquire a copy of research UNIX Edition 5
for $150 ($110 Australian) in December, 1974, including tape and
manuals. (See "An Interview with John Lions," in Unix Review, October,
1985, pg. 51)"[8]

(Aussies may be surprised to learn that that the AUD was once "stronger"
than the USD.  As a former resident, I was!)

> As such, the two systems should likely either be added to standards(7)
> so they can be referenced,

Yes, maybe under a different heading.  They weren't standards, but they
_are_ worthwhile benchmarks.

> or be removed from the HISTORY of alloca(3) and replaced with another
> system/standard.

There was no _standard_ for anything to do with Unix until the
/usr/group user group (get it?) produced one in 1984.[10]

> I would think they should be added to standards(7), but perhaps
> they're too old be notable enough.  Wikipedia says they were released
> in 1977 & 1979, while the oldest standards listed in standards(7) are
> K&R C (1978) and V7 (1979).

Again, K&R C wasn't standardized; it had a reference manual, which is
not the same thing.

Maybe we should term such things "milestones".

I don't think age alone is a sufficient criterion to reject them, but
when citing non-standards in "STANDARDS" sections of man pages, we might
want to use English to clarify the matter.

To build on a point of Alex's, whether we can get at authoritative
documentation for citation purposes (and to settle or avoid arguments
over facts) is of more probative value than a standard or milestone's
novelty or lack thereof.  Some things that are old are important, and
others aren't--just as with new things.

Regards,
Branden

[1]  https://www.nhbr.com/a-lesson-from-ge/
[2]  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2015-01/msg00026.html
[3]  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2015-01/msg00029.html
[4]  https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf
[5]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
[6]  https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/552/131/1525975/
[7]  https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-December/032907.html
[8]  https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unix-history/tree/main/licenses
[9]  https://www.tuhs.org/Mirror/Hauben/unix-Part_II.html
[10] https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:standards

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