rk: it’s hyphen-minus actuallyFor something that was supposedly everywhere in the IBM/Microsoft world in the 80's and 90's, I cannot find a single copy online of IBM's Common User Access specifications.
Jake in the desert@rk like, a printed copy? I poked around and found a few wild things around, is this kinda what you were looking for?
https://archive.org/download/ibmsj2703E/ibmsj2703E.pdf
And Nathan's writeup
http://toastytech.com/guis/cua1987.html
And at IBM.com: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=reference-common-user-access-cua-guidelines
Thank you! Unfortunately the first two are about the CUA and the latter talks about how ISPF conforms to the CUA, but the actual specification doesn’t appear to be online.
The spec is split across several documents, all as subdocuments of IBM’s Systems Application Architecture.
Some of those documents are preserved online, some are partially preserved (just things like tables of contents and a few sections), and others exist online only in bibliographies AFAICT.
@rk woww that is wild. You'd think it would all be together somewhere! 🤯
Patrick Georgi@rk Some bits and pieces are linked from https://www.edm2.com/index.php/Systems_Application_Architecture_Library#Common_User_Access
David JONES@rk I bet there's a forgotten warehouse at the back of some Midwest IBM sales office that has literally tons of them shrink-wrapped.
Micah Blachman@rk Is one of these what you're looking for?
https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/IBM_Systems_Journal/313/ibmsj3103C.pdf
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/IBM_Systems_Journal/273/ibmsj2703E.pdf
Thank you, but sadly no. Those are *about* the specification, but aren’t the spec itself.
@rk So strange that it's nowhere online! I'd recommend using the search operator "filetype:pdf" as some of the best resources are hiding behind there.
Oh that’s interesting. Thank you!
Alexander Bochmann@rk @micahblachman It seems the source file for that (in Softcopy Reader .boo format) is available at https://archive.org/details/f29bdg00
From a quick view into the file, quite some content has been lost with that PDF conversion.
(A version of Softcopy Reader is here: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-softcopy-reader-windows-v40-0)
In general, it's a shame how little of the maze of old IBM documentation web sites has been picked up by the Archive.
oh yes (sickos mode)@galaxis @rk @micahblachman i'm a little annoyed no one's figured out the format of these book files yet, the reader software is annoying and decrepit
@libc @galaxis @rk Looks like there's a program on Github that converts the .boo files to PDFs: https://github.com/kev009/boo2pdf
@micahblachman @galaxis @rk this just runs the linux version of this app in a container; it's ultra janky afaik
manes
Ted C. Howard@rk I have a pdf of it somewhere. I’ll try to dig it up and share it.
Ooo. Don’t go out of your way but that would be rad.
@rk Found it! I went searching for this a while back, and had a hard time finding a copy that also had the images. I finally found one in some weird IBM book format. I was able to “print" it to a PDF. Here you go:
https://archive.org/details/common-user-access-basic-interface-design-ibm-corp
Lovely, thank you!
mathewReader -> Bibliophile -> Bibliomaniac -> Bookslut
Pun Boleh@rk Until a few years ago, CUA89 and 91 were still available on IBM's book server:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/Shelves/CEESL002
CUA89 is still available on archive.org, doesn't look like they archived the book server's version of CUA91, though.
(I downloaded CUA91 just before they closed the server, using "Save Page As...", which is good enough to read the document locally, but not exactly a pristine copy for archive purposes.)
Amin Girasol@rk looping in @d_j_fitzgerald
Dan FitzGerald@rk I can probably dig one up. Do you have the actual title and file numbers of the specs?