AT&T and Unix

[Jim Clarke]

Just to stick a totally different oar into these muddy waters:

I'm a novice system administrator (six months' service) on a binary Xenix
system (not the machine I'm writing from).  I have no desire to change the
system I'm running, at least not yet, but I do want to be able to understand
it.  What I keep finding is that the documentation is inadequate:  it's
OK for most simple problems at the user level, but for the kind of troubles
I have as an administrator it looks mostly like a very well-written guide
to the source.  In other words, with this documentation *and* the source,
I could probably figure out most of my troubles, but without the source I'm
just frustrated.  I'm lucky enough to be in a computer science department,
so that as well as my little binary operation there are a few VAXes around
with source, and there are a good many graduate students itching to help
people like me.  What would I do if I were all alone in Timbuctoo?

I'm starting to wish for those yards of shelf filled with IBM manuals that
used to fill me with horror when I visited computer centre offices.  But
we know what's wrong with that approach; what I'd really like to see would
be *printed* copies of the source without on-line copies.  Maybe micro-
fiche copies should be sold -- for, say, several hundred dollars?  Am I
dreaming?