From: lm@bitmover.com (Larry McVoy)
Subject: [TUHS] History of man pages
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:49:50 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20120131154950.GZ17183@bitmover.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <34F8DEFE-9667-4915-9A3F-703EE78C07E1@ronnatalie.com>
I still use it, BitMover's MLA (signed by the likes of Intel, Cisco,
IBM, HP, etc) is maintained in troff. And one of those companies,
not to be named, shoved it into word (in fact they all did that part),
turned on track changes, made some typo like fixes, turned off track
changes, and changed some major stuff. I took the word doc, extracted
to text, ran it through my formatter and diffed 'em and found the
unwanted changes. Said company proceeded to be shocked! shocked!
shocked, I tell you! Shocked! that this had happened and it must
have been a huge mistake!
Go roff. Or go diff. Or something :)
On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 08:04:09AM -0500, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Gosh, I'd forgotten about that. "Roff is the simplest of the text formatting programs but is utterly frozen."
> They finally dragged me off troff in the mid-90's.
>
>
> On Jan 30, 2012, at 8:53 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 12:36:31PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> >> I've received a link http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html claiming to
> >> be about man pages; in fact, it's a lot more than that, including the
> >> prehistory of troff. Interesting stuff.
> >>
> >> Greg
> >
> > Thanks Greg, yes a good read. Pity we've lost the PDP-11 asm
> > version of roff from 1st/2nd Edition Unix.
> > Warren
> > _______________________________________________
> > TUHS mailing list
> > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com
prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-01-31 15:49 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-01-31 1:36 Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2012-01-31 1:53 ` Warren Toomey
2012-01-31 13:04 ` Ronald Natalie
2012-01-31 15:49 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20120131154950.GZ17183@bitmover.com \
--to=lm@bitmover.com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).