Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA (12/11/83)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@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@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@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 -------
drh.arizona%rand-relay@sri-unix.UUCP (12/11/83)
i assume that if we've sent our 4.1 license for the previous version of Tex, we do not need to send another copy to get Tex82, 1.0; right? dave hanson drh@arizona arizona!drh