From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "James A. Robinson" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book In-reply-to: Message from "Douglas A. Gwyn" of "Mon, 08 Jan 2001 16:18:56 GMT."References: <3A59E217.D84DBB99@arl.army.mil> <20010107151801.CD357199F7@mail.cse.psu.edu> <3A59E217.D84DBB99@arl.army.mil> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <24893.978974375.1@aubrey.stanford.edu> Message-Id: <20010108171937.8549919A1C@mail.cse.psu.edu> Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 09:19:36 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 483ec0c8-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > As I recall, Knuth started development of TeX and Metafont > because he was dissatisfied with the appearance of one edition > of TAOCP. I have never seen any evidence that he is familiar > with troff or even with Unix. He started working on what he calls a 'proto TeX' in 1977, and I believe the PDP-11 showed up at Stanford in 1976. He states in the introduction of TeX: The Program that he had many comments from Howard Trickey, who later ported TeX to Unix at Stanford. I expect he could answer whether or not Troff was known to folks at Stanford. I think this time period was before the rewrite of troff to be device independent. That may have something to do with Knuth's development of his own system. Jim