From: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
To: josh <joshnatis0@gmail.com>
Cc: coff@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 22:26:10 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <Yd+b0hIkTePXBzfF@mit.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAFZukdTCh5+F06Lv5avaq5roV0P0iuiUG=FYcA544TEjKYnscg@mail.gmail.com>
On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 09:04:32PM -0500, josh wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Given the recent (awesome) discussions about the history of *roff and TeX, I
> thought I'd ask about where Brian Reid's Scribe system fits in with all this.
> His thesis is available online here:
> http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf, and in my
> opinion is very interesting (also cites papers on roff and TeX). Does anybody
> know if Scribe was ever used on Unix systems? Does it exist at all today?
Scribe was used at Project Athena at MIT, where it was running on BSD
4.3+ on Vax/750's. So it was definitely used on Unix systems. There
were thesis templates for Undergraduates using both Scribe and LaTeX.
LaTeX was pretty painfully slow on 1 MIPS machines, but it was better
at typesetting complex math equations, which gave it the edge for
people majoring in Math, Compter Science, and Engineering degrees.
My impression was that Scribe was a bit more popular for people
majoring in Humanities (at MIT, Theater, Music, Social Studies,
Foreign Languages, etc., were all collapsed into a single department,
aka Course 21 --- and there *were* some people who ended up graduating
with an undergraduate degree in Course 21, with a concentration in,
say, Theater or Music).
Speaking of typesetting equations, how would people compare eqn versus
LaTeX? I used nroff for man pages, but I never did learn how to use
eqn for nroff.
- Ted
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-01-13 3:32 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-01-13 2:04 josh
2022-01-13 2:03 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2022-01-13 3:24 ` Win Treese
2022-01-13 14:56 ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 15:08 ` John P. Linderman
2022-01-13 16:06 ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 16:24 ` Warner Losh
2022-01-13 16:39 ` Harald Arnesen
2022-01-13 18:00 ` Bakul Shah
2022-01-13 15:35 ` Dan Cross
2022-01-13 16:02 ` Warner Losh
2022-01-13 16:20 ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 16:32 ` Warner Losh
2022-01-13 16:42 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2022-01-13 16:52 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-13 16:54 ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 17:06 ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 18:16 ` Dan Cross
2022-01-13 20:00 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-13 20:26 ` Chet Ramey
2022-01-13 16:13 ` Charles H Sauer
2022-01-13 22:53 ` David Arnold
2022-01-14 1:53 ` Adam Thornton
2022-01-13 3:26 ` Theodore Ts'o [this message]
2022-01-13 16:25 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-13 16:33 ` Dan Cross
2022-01-13 22:19 ` David Arnold
2022-01-13 13:54 ` Adam Sampson
2022-01-13 16:37 ` Lars Brinkhoff
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