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Table of Contents
Research
First and Second Editions
The manual was initially published as the UNIX Programmer's Manual, and would retain this name throughout the various research editions. The First and Second Edition manuals were written in roff(I) and consisted of 7 sections, identified by Roman numerals:
I. Commands II. System calls III. Subroutines IV. Special Files V. File Formats VI. User-Maintained Programs VII. Miscellaneous
In addition to these sections, the manuals include a title page, introduction, table of contents, and permuted index. At this point, the manual pages still include the OWNER section, detailing who last touched (and by definition owned) the material in question. The pages are identified by the date in the left and the page name in the right of the masthead of each page. There is no text in the middle. Both manuals describe the PDP-11/20 version of UNIX (i.e. the “second version” as described by The UNIX Time-Sharing System.) Additional documentation, at this point, was limited to technical memoranda and other such papers distributed within Bell Laboratories. There is no formalized “look” to the manual this early on, rather, the pages are simply distributed as printouts from the line printer. Documents are likely to contain 7 hole punches as Bell System practices at this time were to punch 7 holes, 3 to match the conventional 3-ring binders used ubiquitously but 4 additional holes to match the 4-ring binders more commonly used throughout the Bell System.
The Second Edition manual adds a preface detailing some overarching changes since the last version as well as acknowledging folks who contributed to the system up to this point. The man(I) command shows up in the Second Edition for reading these manuals online.
Third Edition
The Third Edition manual is still written in roff(I) but adds a new section:
VIII. Maintenance
This manual additionally adds a “How To Get Started” section derived from the login(VII) page present in previous manuals. This manual describes the assembly PDP-11/45 version of UNIX that straddles the space between the PDP-11/20 version described by the prior to manuals and the first C version of UNIX which would be described in the subsequent edition. While the OWNER section has been dropped as of this manual, there is a list in the introduction laying out rough ownership of contributions. The page masthead is altered in that now the page name is displayed in both corners and the date is displayed in the center.
Fourth and Fifth Editions
The Fourth Edition manual sees the transition from roff(I) to nroff(I)-based typesetting. The remaining ownership information is dropped. There is currently not a scanned PDF of the Fourth Edition manual available, as such the above link is instead to the manpage sources. With the change to nroff(I), literals in descriptions are now boldface rather than underlined. These are likely the first manual editions to see any distribution outside of the Bell System, which like internal distribution, would've been limited to pages typeset on the phototypesetter and then printed on standard paper.
Sixth Edition
The Sixth Edition manual describes the last version of UNIX prior to the Interdata 8/32 portability work and subsequent overarching kernel changes involved. The Sixth Edition is also the last edition published before significant integration of PWB and other such components from elsewhere in the Bell System back into the research edition. In addition, the section numbering after this edition transitions to Arabic numerals from the Roman numerals which have been in use since the beginning. The following two sections are renamed and slightly adjusted:
V. File Formats and Conventions ... VII. User-Maintained Subroutines
Documents for Use With the UNIX Time-Sharing System
The Sixth Edition also sees the first publication of the companion documentation set variably identified as Documents for UNIX, Volume 2, and other such collections throughout time. Prior to this, the documents were available as technical memoranda in the Bell System document catalogue.