A CALL FOR WIZARDS, WRITERS AND UNIX GURUS

[mi...@well.uucp]

A CALL FOR WIZARDS, WRITERS AND UNIX GURUS July 13, 1986

My company, The Waite Group, is creating an exciting contributed book called
THE UNIX PAPERS. The book contains articles written by a broad range of Unix
experts, gurus, wizards and spokespersons, collected together and edited by
myself and the staff at The Waite Group.

We are approaching the most interesting experts and authors in the Unix field
including: Bill Joy, Rusty Smith, Dennis Ritchie, David Korn, Steve Bourne,
Erik Fair, Donald Knuth, Peter Marvit, Mohandas Nai, Gene Dronek, Roger Sippl,
Nico Neirenberg, Jim Stonebraker, Geoff Goodfellow, Dave Woods, Rebecca Thomas,
Bill Croft, David Kashton and many others. We are also interesting in hearing
from less well known but similarly talented Unix programmers and writers to
make a contribution to the UNIX PAPERS.

The goal of THE UNIX PAPERS is to provide insightful information on the Unix
operating system and business market, to reveal some of the more hidden and
obscure truths about Unix, and to do all this in an interesting format. The
audience level is intermediate to advanced business people, programmers and
anyone who wants to know about the cutting edge of this powerful and elegant
operating system.

The book consists of three types of contributions:

a. TUTORIALS on topics that have never been adequately discussed in the
literature (uucp, termcap, curses, etc) as well as new concepts arising in Unix
(unix on risc, unix databases, etc)
b. ISSUE PAPERS by experts in a particular area of Unix (these discuss
controversy, the future of, etc)
c. CASE HISTORY papers which tell the bottom line about real Unix machines,
software, installations, etc.

I am writing to you at this time to see if you would be interested in
authoring an article on one of the topics in the list, or an article on
something we have missed you may think is hot.

DETAILS ABOUT THE UNIX PAPERS

The Unix Papers will be published by Howard W. Sams in the beginning of 1987.
It will contain 15 contributors. The average length article is 20 pages.
Authors are paid a fee, and their photograph and biography appear at the
beginning of their article.

ABOUT THE WAITE GROUP

The Waite Group is a collective of authors in the San Francisco Bay Area. The
Waite Group has produced 40 award winning computer titles over the last 10
years, and is known for its high quality titles on Unix, C and MS-DOS. Among
its most notable books are: (from Howard Sams) C Primer Plus, UNIX Primer Plus
(Berkeley), UNIX System V Primer, Advanced Unix, MS-DOS Bible, MS-DOS
Developer's Guide (from New American Library), Assembly Language Primer for the
IBM PC & XT, and Bluebook of Assembly Language Routines for the IBM PC & XT.

Here is the outline and our targeted list of contributors. Topics marked with
a ** have been taken as of June 26, 1986.

*******************************************************************
THE UNIX PAPERS OUTLINE

**FROM DOS TO UNIX
Thousands of MS-DOS users are learning Unix. Jim Rosenberg tells
these MS-DOS users all about UNIX, explaining both the Unix file system and the
Unix command set in a language MS-DOS users understand.

**NEWSNET IN 10 EASY STEPS
Waite Group staffer Harry Henderson removes the complexity surrounding
the use of readnews, rn, vnews and postnews, in a simple tutorial that will
have you discovering valuable newsnet bulletins for hours.

UNIX ON 3M MACHINES
What is the future of Unix on the 3M machines being built by NeXT,
Atari and Apple? How will these machines work, what will they offer that
current 0.3M machines (Macintosh, etc) don't offer, what will they cost, what
kind of software will we see.

LOW COST UNIX (MICROPORT) AND THE FUTURE OF HIGH COST XENIX
Now that a complete certified System V Unix for the XT and AT is
available for $160, how long can Xenix remain priced at $495? The author of
this contribution explores what the new low cost Unix kernals are like, and how
they will change the microcomputer/Unix/Xenix landscape.

THE FUTURE OF BERKELEY UNIX
This contribution reveals where BSD4.3 is headed, how it is diverging
from System V, what that means in the market and in the university, and how the
end user will be effected by these two diverging operating systems.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH UNIX - WHAT IS RIGHT WITH UNIX
Sprinkled throughout THE UNIX PAPERS are little one, two and three
paragraph quotes from our authors about the good and the bad of Unix.

UNIX ON RISC
What does it mean when Unix is running on a RISC machine, like the IBM
RT, or larger minis? MIPS tie in.

UNIX ON THE 68020
The 68020 offers VAX-like processing power in the microcomputer price
range, and are being found in large numbers of Unix based computers. This
chapter explores the reasons the 68000 line is a good choice for a Unix based
micro.

UNIX ON THE 80286/386
IBM has made a firm commitment to the 8086 line of microprocessors.
Therefore it is likely that Unix will be offered on the next generation of
microcomputers based on the 80286 and 80386. This chapter explores the reasons
that the 80286 line is a good choice for a Unix based microcomputer.

BENCHMARKS AND UNIX
Here we show you how to understand what Unix benchmarks mean. Several
of the most popular Unix supermicros and minis are compared using different
benchmarks.

DATA BASE PROGRAMS UNDER UNIX
What is the equivalent Unix 1-2-3 clone? Is there a database program
as good as dBASE II that runs under Unix? Is it a memory hog? Learn these
things and more.

NETWORKING UNIX
Networking File System (NFS) is explained as is AT&T's Remote File
System and Streams.

GRAPHICS
Included here are NAPLPS and LU.G.

UUCP, USENET, AND WORLDNET
What is happening with Unix and its existing networks. Is it growing?
What direction? What new social structures are forming as a result of these
networks? What is WorldNet?

**ELECTRONIC MAIL
Dave Taylor of H.P. Labs teaches you everything you ever wanted to
know every version of mail under Unix including /bin/mail, mailx, rmail, mh,
elm and AT&T's new mail.

**UNIX ON BIG MACHINES
Chris Morgan tells us what it is like to run Unix on a Cyber system
and what the State of California Unix computing is like today.

SECURITY UNDER UNIX
This section goes inside Unix to expose its delicate security under
belly, and presents simple techniques that solve these weaknesses.

UNIX TEXT MANIPULATION AND DESKTOP PUBLISHING
Find about what Unix can do for text manipulation and desktop
publishing. Learn about TeX. Various Unix Word Processors are compared to the
popular MS-DOS versions of Word, WordStar and others.

UNIX EXPERT SYSTEMS
Franz Lisp

REAL TIME UNIX
Who?

EMERGING UNIX STANDARDS
AT&T is merging Berkeley Unix 4.2 features in to System V Release 3,
while Berkeley is headed off in another direction. What does this mean?

WHAT SHELL?
The new Korn shell has the best features of the c-shell and the Bourne
shell. The author of this section tells us what the major differences in the
numerous Unix shells are and how to decide which is right for you.

******************************************************************************

If I have piqued your interest I would love to discuss the design and nature
of the book and what chapter(s) you might write. Of course our ideas can be
easily modified if you would like to write about something we have not
mentioned. Let me know if you are interested.

You can send me e-mail here on the Well (well!mitch), or call me at
415-929-7088. The editor for this book is Jim Stockford, also on the Well
(well!jim).

Thank you very much for your time,

Sincerely,

Mitchell Waite
President

The Waite Group
3220 Sacramento Street
San Francisco CA 94115
well!mitch