[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Sebastien F4GRX <f4grx@f4grx.net>]

Hi,

Very interesting trivia, I didnt know, thanks!


Funnily, this scribe document has a joke about hyp-

henation.


Sebastien


Le 10/01/2024 à 19:50, tuhs@cuzuco.com a écrit :
> No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
> the software side were -
>
> 1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
>     not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one of his
>     books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that if you
>     wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
>     yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.
>
> 2) Scribe. From Brian Reid, of Carnegie-Mellon
>     See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/scribe.pdf
>
> -Brian
>
> Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com wrtoe:
>> Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:19b /PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and
>>> one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the
>>> thing?  Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end
>>> user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of
>>> example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using
>>> their new, expensive instrument?  Did they have any "packaged bundles" for
>>> users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?
>>>
>> Basically, the phototypesetter part was turnkey with a built-in
>> minicomputer with a paper tape unit, later a micro and a floppy disk as a
>> cost reduction.   The preparation for the typesetter was often done
>> independently, but often the vendor offered some system to prepare the PPT
>> or Floppy.  Different typesetter vendors targeted different parts of the
>> market, from small local independent newspapers (such as the one my sister
>> and her husband owned and ran in North Andover MA for many years), to
>> systems that Globe or the Times might.  Similarly, books and magazines
>> might have different systems (IIRC the APS-5 was originally targeted for
>> large book publishers).  This was all referred to as the 'pre-press'
>> industry and there were lots of players in different parts.
>>
>> Large firms that produced documentation, such as DEC, AT&T *et al*., and
>> even some universities, might own their own gear, or they might send it out
>> to be set.
>>
>> The software varied greatly, depending on the target customer.   For
>> instance, by the early 80s,  the Boston Globe's input system was still
>> terrible - even though the computers had gotten better.  I had a couple of
>> friends working there, and they used to b*tch about it.  But big newspapers
>> (and I expect many other large publishers) were often heavy union shops on
>> the back end (layout and presses), so the editors just wanted to set strips
>> of "column wide" text as the layout was manual.  I've forgotten the name of
>> the vendor of the typesetter they used, but it was one of the larger firms
>> -- IIRC, it had a DG Nova in it.    My sister used CompuGraphic Gear, which
>> was based on 8085's.  She had two custom editing stations and the
>> typesetter itself (it sucked).  The whole system was under $35K in
>> late-1970s money - but targeted to small newspapers like hers. In the
>> mid-1908s, I got her a Masscomp at a reduced price and put 6 Wyse-75
>> terminals on it, so she could have her folks edit their stories with vi,
>> run spell, and some of the other UNIX tools.  I then reverse-engineered the
>> floppy enough to split out the format she wanted for her stories -- she
>> used a manual layout scheme.  She still has to use the custom stuff for
>> headlines and some other parts, but it was a load faster and more parallel
>> (for instance, we wrote an awk script to generate the School Lunch menus,
>> which they published each week).
>>