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* [TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history
@ 2022-01-14  0:04 Tom Lyon via TUHS
  2022-01-14  0:10 ` Rob Pike
  2022-01-14 11:59 ` Angelo Papenhoff
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 13+ messages in thread
From: Tom Lyon via TUHS @ 2022-01-14  0:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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Most of y'all are aware of Brian Kernighan's troff involvement. My
understanding is that he pretty much took over nroff/troff after Joe Ossana
died, and came out with ditroff.

But Brian had much earlier involvement with non-UNIX *roff.  When he was
pursuing his PhD at Princeton, he spent a summer at MIT using CTSS and
RUNOFF.  When he came back to P'ton, he wrote a ROFF for the IBM 7094,
later translated to the IBM 360.  Many generations of students, myself
included, use the IBM ROFF (batch, not interactive) as a much friendlier
alternative to dumb typewriters.  I don't know if 360 ROFF spread beyond
Princeton, but I wouldn't be surprised.

BTW, during my summer at Bell, nroff/troff was one of the few programs I
could not port to the Interdata 8/32 - it was just a mess of essentially
typeless code.  I don't think Joe Ossana got around to it either before he
died.

-- 
- Tom

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 13+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history
@ 2022-01-14 13:07 Noel Chiappa
  2022-01-14 13:27 ` Angelo Papenhoff
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 13+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2022-01-14 13:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > From: Angelo Papenhoff

    > to my knowledge no troff version before the C rewrite in v7

Apologies if I missed something, but between this list and COFF there's so
much low S/N traffic I skip a lot of it. Having said that, was there ever a
troff in assembler? I'd always had the impression that the first one was in C.

    > The v6 distribution has deleted directory entries for troff source but
    > not the files themselves.  I hope it is not lost. Maybe someone here has
    > an idea where it could be found?

The MIT 'V6+' (I think it's probably basically PWB1) system had troff -
i guess it 'fell off the back of a truck', like a lot of other stuff MIT had,
such as 'typesetter C', the Portable C Compiler, etc.

Theirs was modified to produce output for a Varian (I forget which model,
maybe the docs or driver say).

nroff on that system seems to have been generated from the troff sources; the
assembler nroff sources aren't present.

I looked at its n1.c, and compared it to the V7 one:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/n1.c

and this one appears to be slightly earlier; e.g. it starts:

  #include "tdef.h"
  #include "t.h"
  #include "tw.h"
  /*
  troff1.c

  consume options, initialization, main loop,
  input routines, escape function calling
  */

  extern int stdi;

and in the argument processing, it has quite a lot fewer.

So that one is a "troff version before the C rewrite in .. v7", but it is in
C. Is that of any interest?

	Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 13+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-01-14 14:26 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-01-14  0:04 [TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history Tom Lyon via TUHS
2022-01-14  0:10 ` Rob Pike
2022-01-14  7:38   ` arnold
2022-01-14 10:13   ` Jaap Akkerhuis
2022-01-14 11:48     ` Rob Pike
2022-01-14 14:08     ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-14 11:59 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2022-01-14 13:07 Noel Chiappa
2022-01-14 13:27 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2022-01-14 13:35   ` Ralph Corderoy
2022-01-14 13:55     ` Will Senn
2022-01-14 13:58       ` Will Senn
2022-01-14 14:25   ` Will Senn

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