TeX82, Version 1.0 for Berkeley Unix, 4.1 and 4.2 bsd

Furuta at WASHINGTON.ARPA Furuta at WASHINGTON.ARPA
Sun Dec 11 18:51:46 AEST 1983


From:  Richard Furuta <Furuta at WASHINGTON.ARPA>

I am pleased to announce the availability of TeX82, Version 1.0, for
Berkeley Unix, version 4.1 bsd and 4.2 bsd.  TeX is Professor Donald
Knuth's typesetting system, "intended for the creation of beautiful
books---and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics."
Version 1.0 is the first "official" release of TeX.  Previous versions
were considered to be "test" versions.  TeX is now frozen, and further
changes will be limited to bug fixes.  TeX is written using the WEB
documentation system which produces Pascal-language code.  TeX82
replaces and obsoletes an earlier version of TeX, called either PTeX,
TeX78, or TeX80, depending on who you are speaking to.  Sites running
this older TeX should upgrade.

The distribution is only available on magnetic tape.  Our distribution
tape includes the TeX82 sources and change files, the WEB system
sources and change files, fonts for devices at 200 pixels/inch and 240
pixels/inch, a partial set of fonts for 300 pixel/inch devices, DVI
device translators for the Symbolics Laser Printer, the Imagen Laser
Printer, and the Versatec printer/plotter, and various other programs
and macro packages (in particular, the first release of AmSTeX for
TeX82).  The tape is written at 1600 bpi in tar format.  It currently
is about 18 megabytes long but since most of this is taken up by the
fonts, most sites can run TeX using much less disk space.  I would
guess that a site with only one device could run with perhaps 5 to 10
megabytes of disk---less if the sources also were not kept on line.

In order to get the tape, send me a check for $50 made to the
University of Washington plus a copy of your 4.1 bsd source license
(the tape includes a modified version of Berkeley's pc compiler, hence
the requirement for the 4.1 license).  My address is:

	Richard Furuta
	Department of Computer Science, FR-35
	University of Washington
	Seattle, WA  98195

The amount we ask for the tape is intended to just reimburse us for
our costs (we are prohibited from making any kind of profit by
University regulations).  Consequently, we would appreciate it if
foreign sites could increase the amount of their check as appropriate
to pay the added postal costs necessary for mailing the tape ($60 U.S.
seems about right).  Since we are not a service organization, we
cannot officially guarantee that the material on the tape will run on
your computer or output device and cannot guarantee any maintenance.
However, it has been our experience that only a very few problems have
been reported by sites trying to get TeX to run.  We also expect that
Stanford will continue to fix bugs in TeX for at least the forseeable
future, and, of course, we try to help out in whatever ways we can.

Please note that it is not necessary for you to send any of your
Western Electric Unix Licenses---only the 4.1 or 4.2 bsd license from
Berkeley.  But please do remember to include the 4.1 or 4.2 bsd
license---we've had to write or call many sites asking for it which
delays things considerably, as well as increasing our costs.  Please
do not send purchase orders as we have no facilities for handling
them.

Please be aware, though, that even though TeX has been frozen, this
does not mean that the current Unix TeX distribution is the "ultimate"
one.  Lamport's LaTeX macro package is expected soon (this package
will provide a Scribe-like interface).  The TeX group at Stanford will
be working on the fonts for the next year or so so these will be
changing although TeX itself should be pretty stable after Version
1.0.  Additionally, we are adding to the Unix distribution tape as we
receive program contributions from sites already running TeX.

For the readers on unix-wizards, I would like to point out that I have
a mailing list which receives notification of updates to TeX.  The
list is also available for those of you who may wish to address
questions to the other recipients (its address is unix-tex at Washington
from the Arpanet and CSNet, decvax!uw-beaver!unix-tex from uucp).  If
you want to be included on this list, just let me know.

Let me make one more small administrative note in passing.  There is
currently a slight backlog of requests for our distribution tape since
we've been holding incoming requests for a couple of weeks now in
anticipation of the release of version 1.0.  I hope to write all of
these tapes at the beginning of the week, so those of you who have
been waiting for tapes should expect to see them sometime soon.

			--Rick

			Furuta at Washington (ARPAnet or CSNet)
			or
			...ihnp4!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta (uucp)
			...decvax!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta
			...ucbvax!lbl-csam!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta

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