Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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below.... [excellent job -- you wrote what I had planned -- few
tweeks/color added below].

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese@acm.org> wrote:

> Scribe was in the mix after troff and TeX.

Fun fact, I believe that bwk was Brian's thesis committee


> Brian Reid’s observation was that writers should be writing, and
> publishing professionals should design how documents look.

It was even more important than that.  Brian Reid observed that *most
documents* looked like their brethren.   For instance, the Unix doc looks
like BTL TM format.  Each university tends to have a 'style' for their
thesis [-me 'knows' how to generate UCB thesis format].  Office
correspondence (letters, memo for file) have a certain look.    So he wants
to separate the description of the output (*i.e.* a template) for a
document and not make the person that did want (need too) think about the
output, just do their thing (as you said -- let writer's write).




> Writers can describe that they want emphasized words,
> chapters, sections, quotations, and the appearance of those is designed by
> people who know about how to do that.
>
> The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for
> some time from a company called Unilogic, later Scribe Systems,

There is a long (and somewhat nasty history history here).  Mike Shamus was
a one-time CMU CS prof.   He created Unilogic and arranged for the IP to be
transferred to him.   They had a transpiler that converted 'compatible
BLISS' (*a.k.a*. Vax Bliss) to other languages.  I believe that a flavor of
Pascal, Ada and C were possible outputs.   I'm not sure of the provenance
of the transpiler.   Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC project -
Product Quality Compiler Compiler, that Wulf and his students were
working.  That work forked Tartan labs around the same time as Unilogic and
I know transpilers had been part of the original work, but I never closed
the loop.  To be honest they had to have been related in some manner, but
that all happened after I had left.

At that point, Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version
to compatible BLISS on VAX/VMS.   Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for
TOPS, Vax both VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other
systems (maybe HP and AIX).  The sad part is that history seems to have
lost both Scribe and the associated transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise,
I'd love to hear something).


> but it didn’t survive in the marketplace. Wordstar and Microsoft Word came
> along on the desktop, and academics didn’t like paying for it.
>
+1  and for many documents (like business letters), I always found Scribe
easier - but maybe that's because I grew up the idea of an editor and *document
compiler* (roff and friends)..

>
> Reid’s idea of how the work should be distributed was swept aside by
> publishing tools that writers could use to do passable documents but
> not beautiful ones.

Amen

In real publishing, the division still exists: lots of
> writing in, say, Microsoft Word that is reworked in publishing software
> like Quark or InDesign for actual printing.
>
To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that
with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not
seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller).  IIRC Ken's
program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also.  But FrameMaker (like
Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear
addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC.  I never really
learned it although  Ken gave me a copy early on to play with.  IIRC our
doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time
were strictly roff as previously discussed).



> But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My
> understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way
> to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic
> LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe.
>
Indeed - that is what I have been told.  I am under the impression that
early on when Brian started as a Stanford Prof, he had difficulty getting a
use license from Unilogic even though he was the original author.
That churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of
LaTex to make Tex more accessible.



>
> Because you can dive into TeX to tweak all the tiny details, and
> because LaTeX packages work at all different levels of abstraction,
> it’s sometimes hard to see the separation there, especially when
> you’re fighting with LaTeX to submit a paper. But it’s the Scribe
> idea at the core.
>
+1

FWIW I was back at CMU a couple of winters ago for the annual 'Build-18'
maker event.  I was chatting with some folks about a few of the cool things
we had worked on in the  70's and which ones had lasted, like the PQCC, the
speech recognition work, Mach, Andrew *et al*.  At that time, I was told
then that there was a linux x86 binary for Scribe still floating around and
some people still used it for some specific documents.  I asked if I could
get a copy to play with and they told me they would try to find it, but
that was right before Covidtide.  It's been crickets since I inquired.
I'll see if I can find out more.

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