From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2018 09:10:23 -0600
Subject: [TUHS] Who used *ROFF?
In-Reply-To: <201805141219.w4ECJo5G030533@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
References: <201805141219.w4ECJo5G030533@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
Message-ID: <201805141510.w4EFANsG002686@freefriends.org>

Hi.

Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> From this distant point in time it seems that it all happened in a couple
> of weeks. Joe Ossanna did most of the teaching, and no doubt supplied
> samples to copy. As far as I know the only other instructional materials
> would have been man pages and the nroff manual (forbiddingly terse,
> though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
> it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.

Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?

Agreed, -man isn't for full-fledged "regular" documents and papers, but
in terms of removing the need for low-level *roff markup, it certainly
does the job.

(Of course, that may be what you meant by saying "the first *real* macro
package ...")

Thanks!

Arnold