% This file should talk about the various publications of the SIPB,
% starting with NETS and NUMS, and continuing on into our successful
% Athena series, and the documentation that supports our services
% (discuss, netnews, laserwriter, X9700).  At least a listing, and how
% the publications were funded.  One pagers, etc.
% LISP Notes
% Manuals in SIPB office for people to look at
% (Multics, PostScript, LaTex, TeX)
% Runoff Wallcharts.
% Emacs intro.
% Policy statements
% Fortran manuals in dorms.
% TOPS-20 manuals.
% NAG manuals
% emacs wallcharts.
% Underground Guide (1985-)
% 1 page x9700 document.
% Using the SIPB Laserwriter
% Inessential Guide to Athena.
% Using Discuss.
% Using Net News
% Essential Latex
%
%Inessential AFS first distributed: 12/90.
%
%Inessential Latex first distributed: 4/87. Most recent edition:
%revision 3, 8/91.
\section{Publications}
The SIPB writes documentation which we supply at no cost to users.
This documentation consists of either short introductory material,
covering those features we feel are important, or guides to useful but
less publicized features.  We provide several documents, ranging from
one to 50 pages in length, and we frequently revise these publications
to follow a changing software environment.

We supplied two documents about Multics, {\it Notes on Using Multics}
(NUMs) and {\it Notes on Editing Text} (NETs). NUMs was a brief
introduction to Multics designed specifically for our users.  NETs was
an introduction to text editing on Multics, emphasizing the use of
emacs and runoff.  The document was a concise and easy to understand
introduction to text editing on Multics.  Our distribution of NUMs and
NETs was partially funded by Finboard.  Other Multics publications
that we distributed were one-page runoff wallcharts, and policy
statements of what SIPB sponsored accounts could be used for.

The SIPB now provides several documents describing the Athena
environment and software that we support.  One of the first Athena-related documents
we produced was {\it The Inessential Guide to Athena}, which catalogs many of the less-publicized commands and capabilities of the Athena
system.  The ``Inessential'' name was a play on the Athena
``Essential'' documents.  The Inessential Guide cover such topics as
file protection, Emacs customization, RMAIL, and basic use of Zephyr, as
well as introductory information for SIPB software like Discuss and
Netnews.

The {\it Inessential \LaTeX} guide provides a sufficient overview of
\LaTeX\ for users to generate most documents.  It covers the minimum
formatting commands and the commands needed to run \LaTeX\ and
preview and print \LaTeX\ documents.  It interprets the obscure error
messages that \LaTeX\ produces, and contains a handy reference to the
special symbols that \LaTeX\ supports.

The {\it Inessential AFS} guide contains an overview of the Andrew File
System used on Project Athena.  It describes the semantics of AFS file
protections, quotas, and volumes, and describes the commands used to
examine these objects.

{\it Using Discuss } is a user's guide to the Discuss system developed
by SIPB.  It describes the basic concepts of Discuss meetings and
transactions, and explains how to access meetings using the terminal,
emacs, and X interfaces.  It also contains a list of interesting
meetings available to MIT users.

SIPB has published a number of short one-page documents describing
single topics.  When we supported printing on the Laserwriter and
Xerox 9700, we had one page guides for each.  We produce {\it A
One-Page Guide to the Usenet}, describing the basics of using Netnews,
and {\it An Inessential Quick Reference to Athena}, which describes
how to log in and out, and gives a list of useful commands and features.