From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_INVALID,DKIM_SIGNED, HTML_MESSAGE,MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 8377 invoked from network); 13 Jan 2022 16:03:15 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 13 Jan 2022 16:03:15 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id E3A0E9CFFE; Fri, 14 Jan 2022 02:03:13 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 24FBA9CF7E; Fri, 14 Jan 2022 02:03:07 +1000 (AEST) Authentication-Results: minnie.tuhs.org; dkim=fail reason="signature verification failed" (2048-bit key; unprotected) header.d=bsdimp-com.20210112.gappssmtp.com header.i=@bsdimp-com.20210112.gappssmtp.com header.b="wxeSirTQ"; dkim-atps=neutral Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 5BC0F9CF7E; Fri, 14 Jan 2022 02:03:05 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mail-ua1-f52.google.com (mail-ua1-f52.google.com [209.85.222.52]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 6D2919C78F for ; Fri, 14 Jan 2022 02:03:04 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mail-ua1-f52.google.com with SMTP id m90so12038348uam.2 for ; Thu, 13 Jan 2022 08:03:04 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=bsdimp-com.20210112.gappssmtp.com; s=20210112; h=mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date:message-id:subject:to :cc; bh=B9Ql4Pq3AP9WOktXM6Ih2bQHLDRm6btDLkPq1y5T6W0=; b=wxeSirTQfAJJxfK9XkESjkSRwQv9HXXO80cRrXfbctUkpTaIq8D6iIw49RpWARX4Ge j4wgud5AxFa+riMQyv06Xslc1VfoUCfT9eO+L0zfk9Fyn0rgmFAE3jD1yihHtus+3Ugv jX25vbL1KWifvo2p+UcxAm539xANvyB1AkMq8aPK3DmGJ8EK4dpfS+cBGmpW709Tz2oV QSht7FuzqQHqXRfzLF/2H2+RxdhM4mTNb8u4yPdAruKiXT9pNvOV5Wwu4rUhISjoEZP9 WBSioLWruWmrMFu8B8Km0je1UkaeMseajWbqpiARHGw7N3xUHOR296/ALBkHmATALlot S3jQ== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20210112; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date :message-id:subject:to:cc; bh=B9Ql4Pq3AP9WOktXM6Ih2bQHLDRm6btDLkPq1y5T6W0=; b=nUv72QxeXN4egCrrI1m9mCPYqCB0ehBU+/t3rH1869GZYs16VAASWYJazrURc2O+yW 0ESlwCWj841Z959zE+CJPdc6+j/UgoQv72tJzHSaKXVcPwZe+H5UASE5D2mypPr82RB/ ooF93u04XuweIS3sUhzYj7PkZ47gpd4Rhk+K9d3rZhzwO24O155doueAI72S+M1dk1d7 DqmyiZ8GjaHDyfxNC5SpDaBodzTr4DzJJqsaP9wT7PQHwa1VuhsTiAn3D0M6N8t/MvxA fPY7ZkX7YEGB4spgsKFuyX7jcn1cxiWsaYvlmdCy50IjlBpjsjiBQXsZFqyZ2Rqxh0j2 BvJQ== X-Gm-Message-State: AOAM532LuKn8Nhmch4PsHPJetnGjmn4xbXDjj/k4ni3NYEoMofNPyHXn 8djTTdz09SygvVeVc7tdP12CqTB23xN4jT2/m+26Jg== X-Google-Smtp-Source: ABdhPJy7jr+wYrOAfZKaSxZsxPqSSdnrVRISsXZwpBHUziT9a4TzAQ8+xQg3QOJS8kUflYhxZoppw33m15gGGqwz2r0= X-Received: by 2002:a05:6102:ecf:: with SMTP id m15mr1615200vst.68.1642089783164; Thu, 13 Jan 2022 08:03:03 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: In-Reply-To: From: Warner Losh Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:02:52 -0700 Message-ID: To: Dan Cross Subject: Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix X-BeenThere: coff@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: Computer Old Farts Forum List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============2145525541495465324==" Errors-To: coff-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "COFF" --===============2145525541495465324== Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0000000000003711d405d578d2f2" --0000000000003711d405d578d2f2 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 8:36 AM Dan Cross wrote: > On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole wrote: > >> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese wrote: >> >>> [snip] >> >> 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 I= P >> 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 PQC= C >> 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 versio= n >> 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 otherwis= e, >> I'd love to hear something). >> > > I understand that Stallman was deeply affected by both the closed nature > of and "time bombs" in Scribe. > > >> [snip] >> >> 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 Ke= n's >> program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also. But FrameMaker (li= ke >> Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit lin= ear >> 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). >> > > Does anyone have any experience with Interleaf? That was another in the > lineage of document processors that seems to have fallen into history. > > 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=E2=80=99s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the bas= ic >>> 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 gettin= g 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. >> > > Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scribe specifically= ; > I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing books. I wonder wha= t > the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all. > You can best view them as -ms vs -me. Two different sets of macros to markup the text with semantic information that's then turned into useful rendering by a variety of ways. texinfo and latex are completely unrelated at a code level. LaTeX predates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it up, but I encountered LaTeX years before texinfo, though it's possible I just ignored it when working on bringing up GNU Emacs on VMS 5.mumble back in the day). It was always my impression that texinfo came more from the ITS info file world and that the TeX bits were initially just a hack because it was also on those machines... It would be interesting to hear from people that were there. > To bring it back to Unix, troff et al are obvious examples of the Unix > philosophy applied to document preparation, while TeX and its progeny hav= e > always felt very foreign to me. They work, of course, but in a way that > feels discordant with respect to the aesthetic of the system. Of course, > TeX originated on the SAIL system, so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world > had different sensibilities than the Unix world. One wonders whether, if > Knuth had been working on a Unix machine instead of SAIL, whether TeX wou= ld > have been as chatty as it is; I suspect not. > Likely not. It was only slightly odd to me because our school moved from TOPS-20 to SunOS and 4.{2,3}BSD (maybe others, don't know when the VAX was delivered: it was just there when I arrived with a boatload of HP terminals attached to it which I thought odd). It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what it does. That seemed perfectly natural to me when I started using it. Warner --0000000000003711d405d578d2f2 Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


=
On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 8:36 AM Dan C= ross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote= :
On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese@acm.org> wrote:
[snip]
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).=C2=A0 M= ike Shamus was a one-time CMU CS prof. =C2=A0 He created Unilogic and arran= ged for the IP to be transferred to him. =C2=A0 They had a transpiler that= converted 'compatible BLISS' (a.k.a. Vax Bliss) to other la= nguages.=C2=A0 I believe that a flavor of Pascal, Ada and C were possible o= utputs. =C2=A0 I'm not sure of the provenance of the transpiler. =C2=A0= Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC project - Product Quality Compiler C= ompiler, that Wulf and his students were working.=C2=A0 That work forked Ta= rtan labs around the same time as Unilogic and I know transpilers had been = part of the original work,=C2=A0but I never closed the loop.=C2=A0 To be ho= nest they had to have been related in some=C2=A0manner,=C2=A0but that all h= appened after I had left.

At that point,= Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version to compatible B= LISS on VAX/VMS. =C2=A0 Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for TOPS, Vax both= VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other systems (maybe H= P and AIX). =C2=A0The sad part is= that history seems to have lost both Scribe and the associated=C2=A0transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to hear something).
<= /div>

I understand that Stallma= n was deeply affected by both the closed nature of and "time bombs&quo= t; in Scribe.
=C2=A0
[snip]
To give ex-CMU and UCB = grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that with his FrameMaker progra= m (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not seen much about it in few=C2= =A0years and have lost track of Keller).=C2=A0 IIRC Ken's program could= take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also.=C2=A0 But FrameMaker (like Scribe) = was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear address= ing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC.=C2=A0 I never really learn= ed it although =C2=A0Ken gave me a copy early on to play with.=C2=A0 IIRC o= ur doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time= were strictly=C2=A0roff as previously discussed).=C2=A0
=

Does anyone have any experience with= Interleaf? That was another in the lineage of document processors that see= ms to have fallen into history.

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=E2=80=99s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe.
Indeed = - that is what I have been told.=C2=A0 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.=C2=A0 That=C2= =A0churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of LaTex = to make Tex more accessible.

Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scri= be specifically; I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing book= s. I wonder what the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all= .

You can best view them = as -ms vs -me. Two different sets of macros to markup the text with semanti= c information that's then turned into useful rendering by a variety of = ways. texinfo and latex are completely unrelated at a code level. LaTeX pre= dates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it up, but I encountered La= TeX years before texinfo, though it's possible I just ignored it when w= orking on bringing up GNU Emacs on VMS 5.mumble back in the day). It was al= ways my impression that texinfo came more from the ITS info file world and = that the TeX bits were initially just a hack because it was also on those m= achines...=C2=A0 It would be interesting to hear from people that were ther= e.
=C2=A0
=
To bring it back to Unix, = troff et al are obvious examples of the Unix philosophy applied to document= preparation, while TeX and its progeny have always felt very foreign to me= . They work, of course, but in a way that feels discordant with respect to = the aesthetic of the system. Of course, TeX originated on the SAIL system, = so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world had different sensibilities than the = Unix world. One wonders whether, if Knuth had been working on a Unix machin= e instead of SAIL, whether TeX would have been as chatty as it is; I suspec= t not.

Likely not. It was= only slightly odd to me because our school moved from TOPS-20 to SunOS and= 4.{2,3}BSD (maybe others, don't know when the VAX was delivered: it wa= s just there when I arrived with a boatload of HP terminals attached to it = which I thought odd). It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what it does. Th= at seemed perfectly natural to me when I started using it.

Warner
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