ascii(7): Correct the history section

[gbe]

Summary

The man page ascii(7) first appears in the first edition manual.

Obtained from: OpenBSD
MFC after: 5 days

[ziaee]

I'm not seeing it in the section 7 pdf here: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/1stEdman.html

[imp]

There's two sources for what's in the manual. One is the actual man pages, the other is the index. Here they disagree. The index says:

but there's no ascii man page in section 7 (at least not in the scanned man71.pdf file we have). It goes from as2 to ba with no ascii in between.

So it's at best ambiguous, but I think I'd be inclined to believe it. I know from back in the day (though the late 70s/early 80s back in the day) that ASCII charts were very common to have posted by terminals in offices / computer terminal rooms of the era. These often were photocopied from the vendor docs, but sometimes the actual pages from the (typically appendix) were posted. There was a greater need to know the ASCII value of space was 32 or 20 hex than there is today for a variety of reasons (some good, some bad). I could easily support the theory that Dennis' ASCII man page had been pilfered for this purpose and that's why it isn't in the scanned section 7 we have. So it's likely that it was removed and used like this, especially if people just thought 'oh, this is the old edition of the manual, nobody would notice it being missing' since photocopying in the early 70s, even at bell labs, was basically unknown.

tl;dr: there likely was one.

[ziaee]

Wow! That was super cool. Thanks!