Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dan Cross

    > a port of the _CTSS_ BCPL ROFF sources purportedly written by Doug. I
    > wonder if that was actually a thing, or an error?
    > ...
    > Fortunately, the source [of the original CTSS runoff] is online:
    > ...
    > Indeed; one finds the following in at least one of the Multics RUNOFF
    > source files:

It sounds like all the steps in the chain have pretty definitive evidence -
_except_ whether there was ever a CTSS RUNOFF in BCPL, from Doug.

Happily, we have someone here who should be able to answer that! :-)
	 Noel

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[John Labovitz]

On Jan 13, 2022, at 02:42, Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:

> John Labovitz wrote:
>> The earliest known text-formatting software, TJ-2, was created by
>> MIT-trained computer scientist Peter Samson in 1963.
> 
> I see claimed predecessors are JUSTIFY and TJ-1.  How do you feel about
> those?

I’m sure I looked for TJ-1 when I did this research — an obvious question, given the ‘2’ suffix — but didn’t find anything then. I’m not familiar with JUSTIFY. 

Do you have links/info for those?

—John

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Lars Brinkhoff]

John Labovitz wrote:
> The earliest known text-formatting software, TJ-2, was created by
> MIT-trained computer scientist Peter Samson in 1963.

I see claimed predecessors are JUSTIFY and TJ-1.  How do you feel about
those?

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[John Labovitz]

On Jan 12, 2022, at 13:06, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been collecting a detailed narrative history not just of the *roff
> _programs_ but also of the development on the language in the roff(7)
> manual page.  

Before RUNOFF was Peter Samson’s TJ-2 in 1963. It seems to have been the first program that incorporated the idea of input lines being interpreted as either control (with a prefix of a dot or other character) or text.

I dug up this history when I wrote ‘The Electric Typesetter: The Origins of Computing in Typography’ for the American Printing History Association’s journal _Printing History_ (issue 21, 2017). Sadly they don’t have online archives; my PDF of the article is here:

	https://johnlabovitz.com/publications/The-electric-typesetter--The-origins-of-computing-in-typography.pdf

It’s about more than markup languages, but here’s the relevant bit:

> The earliest known text-formatting software, TJ-2, was created by MIT-trained computer scientist Peter Samson in 1963. Its design and architecture set the stage for text-formatting and typesetting programs for the next several decades.
> 
> […]
> 
> TJ-2 read lines of text as its input. Each line was collected and formatted to make justified paragraphs (of monospaced type). However, if a line started with a special control code (“overbar,” in the lingo of the PDP-1 system, its host computer), the program interpreted it as a command. There were only a few commands, including a primitive line-centering mode, some simplistic indentation, and a command that left a specific amount of vertical space for a figure (e.g., illustration) to be inserted later.
> 
> […]
> 
> Note that TJ-2 did not interface with a phototypesetter — or any typesetter. Its output was destined to be printed on what was essentially an automatic typewriter outfitted only with monospaced fonts. While this seems a limitation, perhaps it was a necessary constraint at the time. But the TJ-2 went on to inspire (directly or indirectly) a long branch of typesetting software beginning with RUNOFF (“A Right-Justifying Type Out Program”) in 1964, a program that used “control words scattered in the text [to] provide detailed control over the format” of text. RUNOFF substituted TJ-2’s proprietary “overbar” control code with a simple period, and expanded the set of commands to produce line and page breaks and folios (page numbers). Then, in a fairly confusing list of technical begats over a decade or so, RUNOFF (capitals) led to “runoff” (lowercase), then to “rf,” “roff,” “nroff,” and “troff” — all software programs that utilized the same basic idea as TJ-2.

Links from the footnotes:

	TJ-2: http://www.dpbsmith.com/tj2.html
	RUNOFF: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/CC-244.html

Best,
—John

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Adam Thornton]

> On Jan 12, 2022, at 4:27 PM, Charles H. Sauer <sauer@technologists.com> wrote:
> 
> I try to avoid inserting non-Unix IBM stuff into TUHS, but since Clem opened the door, ...
> 
> When I was at Yorktown 1975-77 and 1979-82, using Script (IBM's runoff) on VM/370 was very pleasant from my perspective, for papers, manuals and my three performance modeling books. IIRC when I got there Script output went to Versatecs for draft output and to APS5 for camera ready. By 1979, DCF superseded Script and 6670s superseded Versatecs for draft output. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language seem fair to me.


BookMaster might still be my favorite documentation-creation tool.

Adam

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Charles H. Sauer]

I try to avoid inserting non-Unix IBM stuff into TUHS, but since Clem 
opened the door, ...

When I was at Yorktown 1975-77 and 1979-82, using Script (IBM's runoff) 
on VM/370 was very pleasant from my perspective, for papers, manuals and 
my three performance modeling books. IIRC when I got there Script output 
went to Versatecs for draft output and to APS5 for camera ready. By 
1979, DCF superseded Script and 6670s superseded Versatecs for draft 
output. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup) and 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language seem fair 
to me.

While I'm inserting non-Unix stuff, and presuming some parallel between 
Yorktown and Murray Hill, the culture discussions make me point out that 
I intentionally avoided ties and suits my first couple of years, wearing 
a turtleneck for my initial interviews. Then my wife insisted I start 
wearing three piece wool suits, which were fine in the cold months 
requiring driving, but I avoided them when the weather was warm enough 
for me to cycle the five miles to the lab 
(https://technologists.com/songs/swans.html).

CHS

On 1/12/2022 4:48 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Dan/Branden -- don't forget that IBM had a flavor of the runoff family 
> also at least by the early 1970s when I saw it.  In fact, I learned it 
> before either the DEC ones for the PDP-10s which I saw next, and only 
> after that the UNIX family.    We ran the IBM doc tool on TSS [often of 
> 2741 style devices], and I think it ran on MTS.  Pre-laser printer days, 
> although CS an XGP, it was only 200 dpi (and was on the PDP-10s).  So 
> CMU computer center (IBM shop) even had a very high end printer with a 
> golf ball (serial) output device that was in a locked room that was 
> connected the 360 that they used to print 'special' letters on a fan 
> folded paper that was super high quality and then run through the 
> 'burster' to remove the edges and make it single sheets [Acceptance 
> letters and other special things got printed on it by the computer 
> center for the administration].   I don't remember much about that part 
> of the process, other than the input/prep was from the IBM version of a 
> runoff like program and as an operator, we had to learn to make it go 
> and run things out on it as needed. But I do remember it was a PITA to 
> output to that thing, but the SW also worked on a traditional 2741.  As 
> a member of the computer staff I had access to the 2741 in my office 
> (for APL work), but could set it up as a standard 2741 and type papers 
> on it late at night.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 1:42 PM Dan Halbert <halbert@halwitz.org 
> <mailto:halbert@halwitz.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On 1/12/22 13:06, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>      > Hi, Dan,
>      >
>      > At 2022-01-12T11:33:35-0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>      >> I have some questions about the earlier history.
>      >>
>      >> I've been collecting a detailed narrative history not just of
>     the *roff
>      >> _programs_ but also of the development on the language in the
>     roff(7)
>      >> manual page.  Below I'll share a current chunk of it that is
>     planned for
>      >> the next release (groff 1.23).  It has been heavily revised since
>      >> groff 1.22.4.  Many of my revisions have been motivated by
>     accounts from
>      >> this list, from the "history of man pages" (more of a history of
>     troff)
>      >> at manpages.bsd.lv <http://manpages.bsd.lv>, and the minnie TUHS
>     archive.
> 
>     I used RUNOFF on TOPS-10 in 1971, I think, and eventually also on TENEX
>     and TOPS-20. It probably was available earlier than that. Your history
>     is covering the Unix side, but there is also a pretty robust DEC side.
>     It was available on pretty much all the DEC machines.
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF> has some mentions.
> 
>     Dan H.
> 

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Clem Cole]

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Dan/Branden -- don't forget that IBM had a flavor of the runoff family also
at least by the early 1970s when I saw it.  In fact, I learned it before
either the DEC ones for the PDP-10s which I saw next, and only after that
the UNIX family.    We ran the IBM doc tool on TSS [often of 2741 style
devices], and I think it ran on MTS.  Pre-laser printer days, although CS
an XGP, it was only 200 dpi (and was on the PDP-10s).  So CMU computer
center (IBM shop) even had a very high end printer with a golf ball
(serial) output device that was in a locked room that was connected the 360
that they used to print 'special' letters on a fan folded paper that was
super high quality and then run through the 'burster' to remove the edges
and make it single sheets [Acceptance letters and other special things got
printed on it by the computer center for the administration].   I don't
remember much about that part of the process, other than the input/prep was
from the IBM version of a runoff like program and as an operator, we had to
learn to make it go and run things out on it as needed. But I do
remember it was a PITA to output to that thing, but the SW also worked on a
traditional 2741.  As a member of the computer staff I had access to the
2741 in my office (for APL work), but could set it up as a standard 2741
and type papers on it late at night.

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 1:42 PM Dan Halbert <halbert@halwitz.org> wrote:

> On 1/12/22 13:06, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Hi, Dan,
> >
> > At 2022-01-12T11:33:35-0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> >> I have some questions about the earlier history.
> >>
> >> I've been collecting a detailed narrative history not just of the *roff
> >> _programs_ but also of the development on the language in the roff(7)
> >> manual page.  Below I'll share a current chunk of it that is planned for
> >> the next release (groff 1.23).  It has been heavily revised since
> >> groff 1.22.4.  Many of my revisions have been motivated by accounts from
> >> this list, from the "history of man pages" (more of a history of troff)
> >> at manpages.bsd.lv, and the minnie TUHS archive.
>
> I used RUNOFF on TOPS-10 in 1971, I think, and eventually also on TENEX
> and TOPS-20. It probably was available earlier than that. Your history
> is covering the Unix side, but there is also a pretty robust DEC side.
> It was available on pretty much all the DEC machines.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF has some mentions.
>
> Dan H.
>

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Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Clem Cole]

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Looks excellent -- friendly edit -- ditroff had nothing to do with
vcat/vpr/vtroff.   Tom Ferrin wrote the original at UCSF in the mid/late
70s -- the reasons was the the CAT typesetter was expensive and actually
kinda nasty run.   Many of us had plotters in those days and Tom's hack was
a welcomed addition to the tool set.

instead of:

leading some developers to contrive translators for C/A/T-formatted
documents to other devices.  An example was vtroff for Versatec and
Benson-Varian plotters.


I offer:

In mid/late 70s, Tom Ferrin a graphics researcher at UCSF using the font
set released in the late 1960s, from Alan Hershey [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts], wrote a program to simulate
the C/A/T typesetter allowing the output of the original troff program to
be 'plotted'. This program originally called vcat for virtual cat
typesetter, was first distributed as part of an early USENIX distribution
tape, but was eventually re-released in 3BSD and later BSD distributions as
the UCB vpr(1) command and associated wrapper that call it was created
called vtroff.



On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 1:07 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, Dan,
>
> At 2022-01-12T11:33:35-0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > I have some questions about the earlier history.
>
> I've been collecting a detailed narrative history not just of the *roff
> _programs_ but also of the development on the language in the roff(7)
> manual page.  Below I'll share a current chunk of it that is planned for
> the next release (groff 1.23).  It has been heavily revised since
> groff 1.22.4.  Many of my revisions have been motivated by accounts from
> this list, from the "history of man pages" (more of a history of troff)
> at manpages.bsd.lv, and the minnie TUHS archive.
>
> > As I understand it, in the beginning there was RUNOFF, which I believe
> > originated on CTSS? The CTSS sources contain a RUNOFF program that's
> > made up of ~1100 lines of MAD and ~1300 lines of assembler.
>
> This is a detail I hadn't encountered before; instead I've read claims
> that distorted it into being a solely high-level language project.
>
> > There is certainly a RUNOFF in Multics, written in BCPL (there's a
> > small "outer module transfer vector" program in ALM).
>
> As I understand it, _this_ RUNOFF is undisputedly Doug McIlroy's.
>
> > This is where it gets muddy for me; I understand this was roughly
> > ported to unix as `roff` by Ken and that at this point,
>
> It is hard to find an account of this period that _isn't_ muddy.  Claims
> from Murray Hill luminaries suggest that V0 and V1 Unix roffs were the
> collective work of Thompson, Ritchie, Ossanna, a fourth person who
> contributed the hyphenation algorithm (does someone have the name?), and
> McIlroy, because in Ritchie's words[1], this roff was "transliterated"
> from Doug's BCPL codebase.
>
> > formatting was fairly primitive: suitable for hardcopy terminals and
> > line printers, and could do things like center lines and so forth, but
> > nothing fancy (https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf).
>
> Yes.  My contributions to groff's roff(7) page attempt to shed more
> light on this sort of thing.  Sadly, at crucial periods sources and even
> documentation are missing.  For example, there is an nroff entry in the
> Unix V2 manual table of contents, but no man page is present.  In other
> early editions the reader is asked to see Ossanna for documentation, and
> it seems the corresponding artifacts might be lost to time.
>
> > Ossanna then took over and greatly expanded the capabilities of
> > `roff`, adding macros and traps and making it Turing-complete; this
> > was `nroff`, which grew to become `troff` once the C/A/T typesetter
> > was acquired.
>
> Yes.
>
> Here's what I have, though it looks better typeset[2].  Corrections from
> witnesses are warmly welcomed.
>
> Name
>        roff - concepts and history of roff typesetting
>
> Description
>        The term roff describes a family of document formatting systems
>        known by names like troff, nroff, ditroff, and groff.  A roff
>        system consists of an extensible text formatting language and a
>        set of programs for printing and converting to other text
>        formats.  Unix-like operating systems often distribute a roff
>        system as a core package.
>
> [snip]
>
> History
>        Computer-driven document formatting dates back to the 1960s.  The
>        roff system itself is intimately connected with the Unix
>        operating system, but its roots go back to the earlier operating
>        systems CTSS and Multics.
>
>    The predecessor--RUNOFF
>        roff's ancestor RUNOFF was written in the MAD language by Jerry
>        Saltzer to prepare his Ph.D. thesis using the Compatible Time
>        Sharing System (CTSS), a project of the Massachusetts Institute
>        of Technology (MIT).  The program is generally referred to in
>        full capitals, both to distinguish it from its many descendants,
>        and because bits were expensive in those days; five- and six-bit
>        character encodings were still in widespread usage, and mixed-
>        case alphabetics seen as a luxury.  RUNOFF introduced a syntax of
>        inlining formatting directives amid document text, by beginning a
>        line with a period (an unlikely occurrence in human-readable
>        material) followed by a "control word".  Control words with
>        obvious meaning like ".line length n" were supported as well as
>        an abbreviation system; the latter came to overwhelm the former
>        in popular usage and later derivatives of the program.  A sample
>        of control words from a RUNOFF manual of December 1966 <http://
>        web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/ctss/AH.9.01.html> was
>        documented as follows (with the parameter notation slightly
>        altered).  The abbreviations will be familiar to roff veterans.
>
>                         Abbreviation   Control word
>                                  .ad   .adjust
>                                  .bp   .begin page
>                                  .br   .break
>                                  .ce   .center
>                                  .in   .indent n
>                                  .ll   .line length n
>                                  .nf   .nofill
>                                  .pl   .paper length n
>                                  .sp   .space [n]
>
>        In 1965, MIT's Project MAC teamed with Bell Telephone
>        Laboratories and General Electric (GE) to inaugurate the Multics
>        <http://www.multicians.org> project.  After a few years, Bell
>        Labs discontinued its participation in Multics, famously
>        prompting the development of Unix.  Meanwhile, Saltzer's RUNOFF
>        proved influential, seeing many ports and derivations elsewhere.
>
>        In 1969, Doug McIlroy wrote one such reimplementation of RUNOFF
>        in the BCPL language for a GE 645 running GECOS at the Bell Labs
>        location in Murray Hill, New Jersey.  In its manual, the control
>        commands were termed "requests", their two-letter names were
>        canonical, and the control character was configurable with a .cc
>        request.  Other familiar requests emerged at this time; no-adjust
>        (.na), need (.ne), page offset (.po), tab configuration (.ta,
>        though it worked differently), temporary indent (.ti), character
>        translation (.tr), and automatic underlining (.ul; on RUNOFF you
>        had to backspace and underscore in the input yourself).  .fi to
>        enable filling of output lines got the name it retains to this
>        day.
>
>    Unix and roff
>        roff was one of the first Unix programs.  McIlroy's runoff was,
>        in Dennis Ritchie's term, "transliterated" from BCPL to DEC PDP-7
>        assembly language for the fledgling Unix operating system.  It
>        saw its name shortened to roff (perhaps under the influence of
>        Ken Thompson), while adding support for automatic hyphenation
>        with .hc and .hy requests; a generalization of line spacing
>        control with the .ls request; and what later roffs would call
>        diversions, with "footnote" requests.  This roff indirectly
>        funded operating systems research at Murray Hill, for it was used
>        to prepare patent applications for AT&T to the U.S. government.
>        This arrangement enabled the group to acquire a PDP-11; roff
>        promptly proved equal to the task of typesetting the first
>        edition of the manual for what would later become known as "Unix
>        Version 1", dated November 1971.
>
>        Output from all of the foregoing programs was limited to line
>        printers and paper terminals such the IBM 2471 (based on the
>        Selectric line of typewriters) and the Teletype Corporation Model
>        37.  Proportionally-spaced type was unknown.
>
>    New roff and Typesetter roff
>        The first years of Unix were spent in rapid evolution.  The
>        practicalities of preparing standardized documents like patent
>        applications (and Unix manual pages), combined with McIlroy's
>        enthusiasm for macro languages, perhaps created an irresistible
>        pressure to make roff extensible.  Joe Ossanna's nroff, literally
>        a "new roff", was the outlet for this pressure.  By the time of
>        Unix Version 3 (February 1973)--and still in PDP-11 assembly
>        language--it sported a swath of features now considered essential
>        to roff systems: definition of macros (.de), diversion of text
>        thence (.di), and removal thereof (.rm); trap planting (.wh;
>        "when") and relocation (.ch; "change"); conditional processing
>        (.if); and environments (.ev).  Incremental improvements included
>        assignment of the next page number (.pn); no-space mode (.ns) and
>        restoration of vertical spacing (.rs); the saving (.sv) and
>        output (.os) of vertical space; specification of replacement
>        characters for tabs (.tc) and leaders (.lc); configuration of the
>        no-break control character (.c2); shorthand to disable automatic
>        hyphenation (.nh); a condensation of what were formerly six
>        different requests for configuration of page "titles" (headers
>        and footers) into one (.tl) with a length controlled separately
>        from the line length (.lt); automatic line numbering (.nm);
>        interactive input (.rd), which necessitated buffer-flushing
>        (.fl), and was made convenient with early program cessation
>        (.ex); source file inclusion in its modern form (.so; though
>        RUNOFF had an ".append" control word for a similar purpose) and
>        early advance to the next file argument (.nx); ignorable content
>        (.ig); and programmable abort (.ab).
>
>        Third Edition Unix also brought the pipe(2) system call, the
>        explosive growth of a componentized system based around it, and a
>        "filter model" that remains perceptible today.  Equally
>        importantly, the Bell Labs site in Murray Hill acquired a Graphic
>        Systems C/A/T phototypesetter, and with it came the necessity of
>        expanding the capabilities of a roff system to cope with
>        proportionally-spaced type, multiple type sizes, and a variety of
>        fonts.  Ossanna wrote a parallel implementation of nroff for the
>        C/A/T, dubbing it troff (for "typesetter roff").  Unfortunately,
>        surviving documentation does not illustrate what requests were
>        implemented at this time for C/A/T support; the troff(1) man page
>        in Fourth Edition Unix (November 1973) does not feature a request
>        list, unlike nroff(1).  Apart from typesetter-driven features,
>        Unix Version 4 roffs added string definitions (.ds); made the
>        escape character configurable (.ec); and enabled the user to
>        write diagnostics to the standard error stream (.tm).  Around
>        1974, empowered with multiple type sizes, italics, and a symbol
>        font specially commissioned by Bell Labs from Graphic Systems,
>        Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry implemented eqn for
>        typesetting mathematics.  In the same year, for Fifth Edition
>        Unix, Ossanna combined and reimplemented the two roffs in C,
>        using preprocessor conditions of that language to generate both
>        from a single source tree.
>
>        Ossanna documented the syntax of the input language to the nroff
>        and troff programs in the "Troff User's Manual", first published
>        in 1976, with further revisions as late as 1992 by Kernighan.
>        (The original version was entitled "Nroff/Troff User's Manual",
>        which may partially explain why roff practitioners have tended to
>        refer to it by its AT&T document identifier, "CSTR #54".)  Its
>        final revision serves as the de facto specification of AT&T
>        troff, and all subsequent implementors of roff systems have done
>        so in its shadow.
>
>        A small and simple set of roff macros was first used for the
>        manual pages of Unix Version 4 and persisted for two further
>        releases, but the first macro package to be formally described
>        and installed was ms by Lesk in Version 6.  He also wrote a
>        manual, "Typing Documents on the Unix System", describing ms and
>        basic nroff/troff usage, updating it as the package accrued
>        features.  Sixth Edition additionally saw the debut of the tbl
>        preprocessor for formatting tables, also by Lesk.
>
>        For Unix Version 7 (January 1979), McIlroy designed, implemented,
>        and documented the man macro package, introducing most of the
>        macros described in groff_man(7) today, and edited volume 1 of
>        the Version 7 manual using it.  Documents composed using ms
>        featured in volume 2, edited by Kernighan.
>
>        Ossanna had passed away unexpectedly in 1977, and after the
>        release of Version 7, with the C/A/T typesetter becoming
>        supplanted by alternative devices such as the Mergenthaler
>        Linotron 202, Kernighan undertook a revision and rewrite of troff
>        to generalize its design.  To implement this revised
>        architecture, he developed the font and device description file
>        formats and the device-independent output format that remain in
>        use today.  He described these novelties in the article "A
>        Typesetter-independent TROFF", last revised in 1982, and like the
>        troff manual itself, it is widely known by a shorthand, "CSTR
>        #97".
>
>        Kernighan's innovations prepared troff well for the introduction
>        of the Adobe PostScript language in 1982 and a vibrant market in
>        laser printers with built-in interpreters for it.  An output
>        driver for PostScript, dpost, was swiftly developed.  However,
>        due to AT&T software licensing practices, Ossanna's troff, with
>        its tight coupling to the capabilities of the C/A/T, remained in
>        parallel distribution with device-independent troff throughout
>        the 1980s, leading some developers to contrive translators for
>        C/A/T-formatted documents to other devices.  An example was
>        vtroff for Versatec and Benson-Varian plotters.  Today, however,
>        all actively maintained troffs follow Kernighan's device-
>        independent design.
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
> [1] "The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System", Ritchie, 1984
> [2] Formatted with:
>       groff -man -P-c -Tascii -rLL=72n -rHY=0 -dAD=l build/man/roff.7
>     (The `AD` string is new to groff 1.23 man(7).)
>

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Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Dan Cross]

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On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 1:07 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, Dan,
>
> At 2022-01-12T11:33:35-0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > I have some questions about the earlier history.
>
> I've been collecting a detailed narrative history not just of the *roff
> _programs_ but also of the development on the language in the roff(7)
> manual page.  Below I'll share a current chunk of it that is planned for
> the next release (groff 1.23).  It has been heavily revised since
> groff 1.22.4.  Many of my revisions have been motivated by accounts from
> this list, from the "history of man pages" (more of a history of troff)
> at manpages.bsd.lv, and the minnie TUHS archive.
>

Very interesting. The email mentioning DSR from Dan Halbert linked to a
wikipedia article that in turn links here:
https://manpages.bsd.lv/history/saltzer_23_10_2011.txt

This is an email from Jerry Saltzer that refers to a port of the _CTSS_
BCPL ROFF sources purportedly written by Doug. I wonder if that was
actually a thing, or an error?

> As I understand it, in the beginning there was RUNOFF, which I believe
> > originated on CTSS? The CTSS sources contain a RUNOFF program that's
> > made up of ~1100 lines of MAD and ~1300 lines of assembler.
>
> This is a detail I hadn't encountered before; instead I've read claims
> that distorted it into being a solely high-level language project.
>

Fortunately, the source is online:
https://github.com/rcornwell/ctss/tree/master/src/runoff
The `.fap` files are assembly; for example
https://github.com/rcornwell/ctss/blob/master/src/runoff/lmio12.fap

Brief inspection shows the FAP code mostly dealing with very low-level
details either interfacing with the system for IO/memory or character
handling. Without further examination, I'd be willing to believe the bulk
of the program's logic is in MAD.

> There is certainly a RUNOFF in Multics, written in BCPL (there's a
> > small "outer module transfer vector" program in ALM).
>
> As I understand it, _this_ RUNOFF is undisputedly Doug McIlroy's.
>

Indeed; one finds the following in at least one of the Multics RUNOFF
source files:

From
https://github.com/dancrossnyc/multics/blob/main/library_dir_dir/system_library_standard/source/bound_runoff_.s.archive/runoff_mr1.bcpl
:

//              Roff for MULTICS
//
//  The first ROFF for Multics was written in March, 1969, by
//  Doug McIlroy of Bell Labs.  Art Evans made extensive
//  modifications to it in May and June, 1969, adding many
//  comments and making various changes.
//  Footnoting added by Dennis Capps in 1970.
//  Maintained by Harwell Thrasher in 1971.
//  Many new features added and bugs fixed by R Mabee in 1971-1972.
//  RUNOFF and BCPL were brought over to the 6180 Multics (from 645) in May
of 1973 by R F Mabee.

The copyright statements on all of the runoff source files seem to be dated
1974 (I haven't looked at every one).


> [snip]
> Here's what I have, though it looks better typeset[2].  Corrections from
> witnesses are warmly welcomed. [snip]
>

Thank you; that was very interesting.

        - Dan C.

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Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[Dan Halbert]

On 1/12/22 13:06, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi, Dan,
>
> At 2022-01-12T11:33:35-0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>> I have some questions about the earlier history.
>>
>> I've been collecting a detailed narrative history not just of the *roff
>> _programs_ but also of the development on the language in the roff(7)
>> manual page.  Below I'll share a current chunk of it that is planned for
>> the next release (groff 1.23).  It has been heavily revised since
>> groff 1.22.4.  Many of my revisions have been motivated by accounts from
>> this list, from the "history of man pages" (more of a history of troff)
>> at manpages.bsd.lv, and the minnie TUHS archive.

I used RUNOFF on TOPS-10 in 1971, I think, and eventually also on TENEX 
and TOPS-20. It probably was available earlier than that. Your history 
is covering the Unix side, but there is also a pretty robust DEC side. 
It was available on pretty much all the DEC machines. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF has some mentions.

Dan H.

[TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi, Dan,

At 2022-01-12T11:33:35-0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> I have some questions about the earlier history.

I've been collecting a detailed narrative history not just of the *roff
_programs_ but also of the development on the language in the roff(7)
manual page.  Below I'll share a current chunk of it that is planned for
the next release (groff 1.23).  It has been heavily revised since
groff 1.22.4.  Many of my revisions have been motivated by accounts from
this list, from the "history of man pages" (more of a history of troff)
at manpages.bsd.lv, and the minnie TUHS archive.

> As I understand it, in the beginning there was RUNOFF, which I believe
> originated on CTSS? The CTSS sources contain a RUNOFF program that's
> made up of ~1100 lines of MAD and ~1300 lines of assembler.

This is a detail I hadn't encountered before; instead I've read claims
that distorted it into being a solely high-level language project.

> There is certainly a RUNOFF in Multics, written in BCPL (there's a
> small "outer module transfer vector" program in ALM).

As I understand it, _this_ RUNOFF is undisputedly Doug McIlroy's.

> This is where it gets muddy for me; I understand this was roughly
> ported to unix as `roff` by Ken and that at this point,

It is hard to find an account of this period that _isn't_ muddy.  Claims
from Murray Hill luminaries suggest that V0 and V1 Unix roffs were the
collective work of Thompson, Ritchie, Ossanna, a fourth person who
contributed the hyphenation algorithm (does someone have the name?), and
McIlroy, because in Ritchie's words[1], this roff was "transliterated"
from Doug's BCPL codebase.

> formatting was fairly primitive: suitable for hardcopy terminals and
> line printers, and could do things like center lines and so forth, but
> nothing fancy (https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf).

Yes.  My contributions to groff's roff(7) page attempt to shed more
light on this sort of thing.  Sadly, at crucial periods sources and even
documentation are missing.  For example, there is an nroff entry in the
Unix V2 manual table of contents, but no man page is present.  In other
early editions the reader is asked to see Ossanna for documentation, and
it seems the corresponding artifacts might be lost to time.

> Ossanna then took over and greatly expanded the capabilities of
> `roff`, adding macros and traps and making it Turing-complete; this
> was `nroff`, which grew to become `troff` once the C/A/T typesetter
> was acquired.

Yes.

Here's what I have, though it looks better typeset[2].  Corrections from
witnesses are warmly welcomed.

Name
       roff - concepts and history of roff typesetting

Description
       The term roff describes a family of document formatting systems
       known by names like troff, nroff, ditroff, and groff.  A roff
       system consists of an extensible text formatting language and a
       set of programs for printing and converting to other text
       formats.  Unix-like operating systems often distribute a roff
       system as a core package.

[snip]

History
       Computer-driven document formatting dates back to the 1960s.  The
       roff system itself is intimately connected with the Unix
       operating system, but its roots go back to the earlier operating
       systems CTSS and Multics.

   The predecessor--RUNOFF
       roff's ancestor RUNOFF was written in the MAD language by Jerry
       Saltzer to prepare his Ph.D. thesis using the Compatible Time
       Sharing System (CTSS), a project of the Massachusetts Institute
       of Technology (MIT).  The program is generally referred to in
       full capitals, both to distinguish it from its many descendants,
       and because bits were expensive in those days; five- and six-bit
       character encodings were still in widespread usage, and mixed-
       case alphabetics seen as a luxury.  RUNOFF introduced a syntax of
       inlining formatting directives amid document text, by beginning a
       line with a period (an unlikely occurrence in human-readable
       material) followed by a "control word".  Control words with
       obvious meaning like ".line length n" were supported as well as
       an abbreviation system; the latter came to overwhelm the former
       in popular usage and later derivatives of the program.  A sample
       of control words from a RUNOFF manual of December 1966 <http://
       web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/ctss/AH.9.01.html> was
       documented as follows (with the parameter notation slightly
       altered).  The abbreviations will be familiar to roff veterans.

                        Abbreviation   Control word
                                 .ad   .adjust
                                 .bp   .begin page
                                 .br   .break
                                 .ce   .center
                                 .in   .indent n
                                 .ll   .line length n
                                 .nf   .nofill
                                 .pl   .paper length n
                                 .sp   .space [n]

       In 1965, MIT's Project MAC teamed with Bell Telephone
       Laboratories and General Electric (GE) to inaugurate the Multics
       <http://www.multicians.org> project.  After a few years, Bell
       Labs discontinued its participation in Multics, famously
       prompting the development of Unix.  Meanwhile, Saltzer's RUNOFF
       proved influential, seeing many ports and derivations elsewhere.

       In 1969, Doug McIlroy wrote one such reimplementation of RUNOFF
       in the BCPL language for a GE 645 running GECOS at the Bell Labs
       location in Murray Hill, New Jersey.  In its manual, the control
       commands were termed "requests", their two-letter names were
       canonical, and the control character was configurable with a .cc
       request.  Other familiar requests emerged at this time; no-adjust
       (.na), need (.ne), page offset (.po), tab configuration (.ta,
       though it worked differently), temporary indent (.ti), character
       translation (.tr), and automatic underlining (.ul; on RUNOFF you
       had to backspace and underscore in the input yourself).  .fi to
       enable filling of output lines got the name it retains to this
       day.

   Unix and roff
       roff was one of the first Unix programs.  McIlroy's runoff was,
       in Dennis Ritchie's term, "transliterated" from BCPL to DEC PDP-7
       assembly language for the fledgling Unix operating system.  It
       saw its name shortened to roff (perhaps under the influence of
       Ken Thompson), while adding support for automatic hyphenation
       with .hc and .hy requests; a generalization of line spacing
       control with the .ls request; and what later roffs would call
       diversions, with "footnote" requests.  This roff indirectly
       funded operating systems research at Murray Hill, for it was used
       to prepare patent applications for AT&T to the U.S. government.
       This arrangement enabled the group to acquire a PDP-11; roff
       promptly proved equal to the task of typesetting the first
       edition of the manual for what would later become known as "Unix
       Version 1", dated November 1971.

       Output from all of the foregoing programs was limited to line
       printers and paper terminals such the IBM 2471 (based on the
       Selectric line of typewriters) and the Teletype Corporation Model
       37.  Proportionally-spaced type was unknown.

   New roff and Typesetter roff
       The first years of Unix were spent in rapid evolution.  The
       practicalities of preparing standardized documents like patent
       applications (and Unix manual pages), combined with McIlroy's
       enthusiasm for macro languages, perhaps created an irresistible
       pressure to make roff extensible.  Joe Ossanna's nroff, literally
       a "new roff", was the outlet for this pressure.  By the time of
       Unix Version 3 (February 1973)--and still in PDP-11 assembly
       language--it sported a swath of features now considered essential
       to roff systems: definition of macros (.de), diversion of text
       thence (.di), and removal thereof (.rm); trap planting (.wh;
       "when") and relocation (.ch; "change"); conditional processing
       (.if); and environments (.ev).  Incremental improvements included
       assignment of the next page number (.pn); no-space mode (.ns) and
       restoration of vertical spacing (.rs); the saving (.sv) and
       output (.os) of vertical space; specification of replacement
       characters for tabs (.tc) and leaders (.lc); configuration of the
       no-break control character (.c2); shorthand to disable automatic
       hyphenation (.nh); a condensation of what were formerly six
       different requests for configuration of page "titles" (headers
       and footers) into one (.tl) with a length controlled separately
       from the line length (.lt); automatic line numbering (.nm);
       interactive input (.rd), which necessitated buffer-flushing
       (.fl), and was made convenient with early program cessation
       (.ex); source file inclusion in its modern form (.so; though
       RUNOFF had an ".append" control word for a similar purpose) and
       early advance to the next file argument (.nx); ignorable content
       (.ig); and programmable abort (.ab).

       Third Edition Unix also brought the pipe(2) system call, the
       explosive growth of a componentized system based around it, and a
       "filter model" that remains perceptible today.  Equally
       importantly, the Bell Labs site in Murray Hill acquired a Graphic
       Systems C/A/T phototypesetter, and with it came the necessity of
       expanding the capabilities of a roff system to cope with
       proportionally-spaced type, multiple type sizes, and a variety of
       fonts.  Ossanna wrote a parallel implementation of nroff for the
       C/A/T, dubbing it troff (for "typesetter roff").  Unfortunately,
       surviving documentation does not illustrate what requests were
       implemented at this time for C/A/T support; the troff(1) man page
       in Fourth Edition Unix (November 1973) does not feature a request
       list, unlike nroff(1).  Apart from typesetter-driven features,
       Unix Version 4 roffs added string definitions (.ds); made the
       escape character configurable (.ec); and enabled the user to
       write diagnostics to the standard error stream (.tm).  Around
       1974, empowered with multiple type sizes, italics, and a symbol
       font specially commissioned by Bell Labs from Graphic Systems,
       Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry implemented eqn for
       typesetting mathematics.  In the same year, for Fifth Edition
       Unix, Ossanna combined and reimplemented the two roffs in C,
       using preprocessor conditions of that language to generate both
       from a single source tree.

       Ossanna documented the syntax of the input language to the nroff
       and troff programs in the "Troff User's Manual", first published
       in 1976, with further revisions as late as 1992 by Kernighan.
       (The original version was entitled "Nroff/Troff User's Manual",
       which may partially explain why roff practitioners have tended to
       refer to it by its AT&T document identifier, "CSTR #54".)  Its
       final revision serves as the de facto specification of AT&T
       troff, and all subsequent implementors of roff systems have done
       so in its shadow.

       A small and simple set of roff macros was first used for the
       manual pages of Unix Version 4 and persisted for two further
       releases, but the first macro package to be formally described
       and installed was ms by Lesk in Version 6.  He also wrote a
       manual, "Typing Documents on the Unix System", describing ms and
       basic nroff/troff usage, updating it as the package accrued
       features.  Sixth Edition additionally saw the debut of the tbl
       preprocessor for formatting tables, also by Lesk.

       For Unix Version 7 (January 1979), McIlroy designed, implemented,
       and documented the man macro package, introducing most of the
       macros described in groff_man(7) today, and edited volume 1 of
       the Version 7 manual using it.  Documents composed using ms
       featured in volume 2, edited by Kernighan.

       Ossanna had passed away unexpectedly in 1977, and after the
       release of Version 7, with the C/A/T typesetter becoming
       supplanted by alternative devices such as the Mergenthaler
       Linotron 202, Kernighan undertook a revision and rewrite of troff
       to generalize its design.  To implement this revised
       architecture, he developed the font and device description file
       formats and the device-independent output format that remain in
       use today.  He described these novelties in the article "A
       Typesetter-independent TROFF", last revised in 1982, and like the
       troff manual itself, it is widely known by a shorthand, "CSTR
       #97".

       Kernighan's innovations prepared troff well for the introduction
       of the Adobe PostScript language in 1982 and a vibrant market in
       laser printers with built-in interpreters for it.  An output
       driver for PostScript, dpost, was swiftly developed.  However,
       due to AT&T software licensing practices, Ossanna's troff, with
       its tight coupling to the capabilities of the C/A/T, remained in
       parallel distribution with device-independent troff throughout
       the 1980s, leading some developers to contrive translators for
       C/A/T-formatted documents to other devices.  An example was
       vtroff for Versatec and Benson-Varian plotters.  Today, however,
       all actively maintained troffs follow Kernighan's device-
       independent design.

Regards,
Branden

[1] "The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System", Ritchie, 1984
[2] Formatted with:
      groff -man -P-c -Tascii -rLL=72n -rHY=0 -dAD=l build/man/roff.7
    (The `AD` string is new to groff 1.23 man(7).)

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