[TUHS] CSTR files

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Doug McIlroy]

> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
> Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.

I have the source for CSTR 155, a trilogy on raster ellipses. It uses
interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn.
(If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk,
doesn't have it.)

Doug

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Noel Hunt]

> interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn.
> (If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk,
> doesn't have it.)

Is the source for ideal, command, manual and the document which
appears in the Tenth Edition Manual, all of which are in the
source that was recently released, not what you are after?

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
> > Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.
>
> I have the source for CSTR 155, a trilogy on raster ellipses. It uses
> interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn.
> (If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk,
> doesn't have it.)
>
> Doug
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170828/75a2c268/attachment.html>

[TUHS] CSTR files

[arnold]

Looks like 'prefer' is in there too. :-)

Noel Hunt <noel.hunt at gmail.com> wrote:

> > interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn.
> > (If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk,
> > doesn't have it.)
>
> Is the source for ideal, command, manual and the document which
> appears in the Tenth Edition Manual, all of which are in the
> source that was recently released, not what you are after?
>
> On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
> > > As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
> > > Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.
> >
> > I have the source for CSTR 155, a trilogy on raster ellipses. It uses
> > interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn.
> > (If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk,
> > doesn't have it.)
> >
> > Doug
> >

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Toby Thain]

On 2017-08-27 11:04 PM, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
>> Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.
> 
> I have the source for CSTR 155, a trilogy on raster ellipses. It uses
> interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn.
> (If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk,
> doesn't have it.)

<aside> When people wonder why digital archiving and preservation is so
incredibly hard -- situations like this perfectly illustrate why. </aside>

More on topic though: I'm a typographer with an interest in markup
languages, since I used them commercially in the 1980s (mostly TeX, but
with a large personal macro library, hence invoking the problem above,
if the source documents had even been archived, which they were not --
an even more basic problem).

I'm interested in reading John Labovitz' history, for sure.

--Toby


> 
> Doug
> 

[TUHS] CSTR files

[John Labovitz]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 714 bytes --]


On Aug 28, 2017, at 12:10 AM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:

> More on topic though: I'm a typographer with an interest in markup
> languages, since I used them commercially in the 1980s (mostly TeX, but
> with a large personal macro library, hence invoking the problem above,
> if the source documents had even been archived, which they were not --
> an even more basic problem).
> 
> I'm interested in reading John Labovitz' history, for sure.

Glad to hear it.

I’ve put in a request to the editor of _Printing History,_ asking permission to obtain my article as a PDF, or at worst, something I can format and make available to the list. I’ll let folks know once this happens.

—John

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Arthur Krewat

    > That's not RUNOFF on TOPS-10 (or one it's predecessors) is it?

No, RUNOFF on CTSS - _much_ earlier - CTSS RUNOFF was in '64, which was
the year the PDP-6 came out.

	Noel

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: John Labovitz

    > I found the earliest succession of roff predecessors went something like this:
    > 	TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff

Did you manage to find out from Jerry if he knew of/anything about TJ2 when he did
RUNOFF?

	Noel

[TUHS] CSTR files

[John Labovitz]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 648 bytes --]

On Aug 25, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

>> From: John Labovitz
> 
>> I found the earliest succession of roff predecessors went something like this:
>> 	TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff
> 
> Did you manage to find out from Jerry if he knew of/anything about TJ2 when he did
> RUNOFF?

I did not. I was on a pretty tight deadline when I was writing the article, and didn’t have time to explore. I would love to do so some day, though. I’m particularly interested in the evolution of markup systems, and as far as I can tell, not much has been recorded for posterity.

—John

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi All.

I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could
file:  http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz.

It's just under ten megs.  Warren, can we get this into the archives?

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Warren Toomey]

Yes. On the road at present. Will grab it when I get back.
Cheers, Warren

On 25 August 2017 9:01:39 pm AEST, Aharon Robbins <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>Hi All.
>
>I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could
>file:  http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz.
>
>It's just under ten megs.  Warren, can we get this into the archives?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Arnold

-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170825/5bc6571a/attachment.html>

[TUHS] CSTR files

[arnold]

Most excellent. Much thanks!

Arnold

Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Yes. On the road at present. Will grab it when I get back.
> Cheers, Warren
>
> On 25 August 2017 9:01:39 pm AEST, Aharon Robbins <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
> >Hi All.
> >
> >I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could
> >file:  http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz.
> >
> >It's just under ten megs.  Warren, can we get this into the archives?
> >
> >Thanks,
> >
> >Arnold
>
> -- 
> Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Larry McVoy]

As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.

Any chance of that?

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 02:01:39PM +0300, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> Hi All.
> 
> I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could
> file:  http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz.
> 
> It's just under ten megs.  Warren, can we get this into the archives?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Arnold

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Chris Torek]

Slight digression:

>As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.

The *original* original (Unix) roff (not sure if there was
a precursor elsewhere) was in pdp-11 assembly.

It was hand-translated to assembly-like C somewhere back
in the v6-ish time frame, certainly soon enough to become
nroff and troff in Phototypesetter V6.

(It wasn't until Kernighan rewrote it that it became sort
of reasonable, but that was much later.  I vaguely recall
trying to fix something in the nroff or troff source in
4.xBSD-on-the-VAX, and wow, that code was awful, on the same
scale as the original vi perhaps.)

>Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.

I remember using tbl and eqn on the 4.xBSD VAX.  (We did not have
pic at that time.)  Then we got TeX and I did everything new in
TeX if possible, but I did actually miss tbl: while its
*formatting* was not so great, it was a much better *markup*
language than original or later LaTeX table constructs.

Chris

[TUHS] CSTR files

[John Labovitz]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 935 bytes --]

On Aug 25, 2017, at 2:27 PM, Chris Torek <torek at torek.net> wrote:

>> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
> 
> The *original* original (Unix) roff (not sure if there was
> a precursor elsewhere) was in pdp-11 assembly.

Last fall, I wrote an article for the American Printing History Association called 'The Electric Typesetter: The Origins of Computing in Typography.’ In doing research, I found the earliest succession of roff predecessors went something like this:

	TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff

TJ-2 is described at <http://www.dpbsmith.com/tj2.html>. I don’t have info on the other processors at hand at the moment.

Folks here might be interested in my article, but sadly the journal doesn’t tend to put their content online for quite a while. The TOC for the issue is at <https://printinghistory.org/publications/printing-history/ns/#21>.

—John

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Arthur Krewat]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 807 bytes --]

On 8/25/2017 4:27 PM, John Labovitz wrote:
> TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff
That's not RUNOFF on TOPS-10 (or one it's predecessors) is it?

For example, from the TOPS-10 Kermit source, k10133.rno:

.AP.SP 2
.PS 60,70
  Kermit-10 now has a lot of patches put into it.  The first set of
patches is based on those submitted by PIMA.  The subsequent patches are
added in order to make Kermit-10 similar to Kermit-32.  The last patch is
to change all the search file names to K10??? as opposed to KER???.
.B 2
.HL 1;PATCH [127]
  Based on the patches we received from PIMA the following changes have
been added to KERMIT and KERUNV.
.B.LS
.LE;Fix IFN stopcode if syntax error in KERMIT.INI.
.LE;Add help text for connect mode ESCape commands.
Q (Quit) and R (Resume) logging

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 3:04 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:

> On 8/25/2017 4:27 PM, John Labovitz wrote:
>
>> TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff
>>
> That's not RUNOFF on TOPS-10 (or one it's predecessors) is it?
>

They are all interrelated. I've seen a number of family trees over the
years, but couldn't find one via google just now.

Warner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170825/d47e2ebd/attachment.html>

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Mutiny]

'From: Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>
 They are all interrelated. I've seen a number of family trees over the years, but couldn't find one via google just now.'
 
Check out: https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.htmlhttps://manpages.bsd.lv/history.png
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170826/b533433a/attachment.html>

[TUHS] CSTR files

[arnold]

The original sources for troff are around, look at the Heirloom Unix
project.

I assume that you meant the sources for the CSTRs themselves. BWK
donated the sources for the troff tutorial and troff manual and I sent
them to Warren some time ago.  The original Bell Labs guys would have
to indicate if they have sources for any of the others.

Undoubtedly some of them could be reconstituted via OCR, but that's
a serious project. (Worth doing, IMHO, but still a serious project; I
don't have the cycles for anything like that...)

Arnold

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
> Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.
>
> Any chance of that?
>
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 02:01:39PM +0300, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > Hi All.
> > 
> > I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could
> > file:  http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz.
> > 
> > It's just under ten megs.  Warren, can we get this into the archives?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Arnold
>
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] CSTR files

[Steve Simon]

Hi,

i do have a tool for plan9 which attempts to convert html to troff source. this is not the standard plan9 tool but something of my own creation.

at one time some (maybe all) the cstr papers where available as html. if anyone can find copies in html i could try and reverse them.

fyi i even had a go at rfc2ms which works fairly well for some rfcs, it tries to generate a more troff-like doc than 66 lines per page, block caps for emphasis style used in rfcs. it works well for some docs but like many projects, is unfinished.

troff addicts are welcome to the code for both, but beware, the plan9ports toolkit will be needed for [lu]nix.


-Steve


> On 27 Aug 2017, at 16:11, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> The original sources for troff are around, look at the Heirloom Unix
> project.
> 
> I assume that you meant the sources for the CSTRs themselves. BWK
> donated the sources for the troff tutorial and troff manual and I sent
> them to Warren some time ago.  The original Bell Labs guys would have
> to indicate if they have sources for any of the others.
> 
> Undoubtedly some of them could be reconstituted via OCR, but that's
> a serious project. (Worth doing, IMHO, but still a serious project; I
> don't have the cycles for anything like that...)
> 
> Arnold
> 
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
>> Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.
>> 
>> Any chance of that?
>> 
>>> On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 02:01:39PM +0300, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>>> Hi All.
>>> 
>>> I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could
>>> file:  http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz.
>>> 
>>> It's just under ten megs.  Warren, can we get this into the archives?
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> 
>>> Arnold
>> 
>> -- 
>> ---
>> Larry McVoy                     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] CSTR files

[William Cheswick]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 229 bytes --]

CSTR 145 is mine, if any one cares.  LaTeX, as appropriate for

A Permuted Index for TeX and LaTeX.

I found Lorinda’s permuted index of Unix commands to be an import part of learning which Unix filters were available.

ches