Original troff targeted only the C/A/T typesetter. bwc > On Jan 23, 2023, at 3:58 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > At 2023-01-23T00:32:53-0800, James Johnston wrote: >> At one point it was like $22/page. >> >>> On Sun, Jan 22, 2023 at 11:30 PM wrote: >>> >>> Warner Losh wrote: >>> >>>> And I believe that the impetus for the V7 changes was >>>> phototypesetting 'file not found' too often... But that last bit >>>> is mostly because I want to believe. >>> >>> Doug McIlroy has told that story here, search the archives. >>> It was indeed becase of the phototypesetter. > > Steve Johnson's email[0] (which I cited in my earlier reply to this > thread) said it took only "a couple of days" after acquistion of the > phototypesetter for this to happen. But the C/A/T was acquired by > 1973[1], and the Hunt Brothers' cornering of the silver market occurred > in March 1980[2], over a year _after_ the release of V7[3]. > > It seems both of these can't be true. I wondered if maybe only a later > typesetter used a silver-based photochemical development process, but > that doesn't work with troff history either, as device-independent troff > wasn't ready to go until about January 1981, targetting the C/A/T and > the Autologic APS-5[4], the latter with support so fresh that it wasn't > in the manual yet[5]. > > Can someone reconcile these points? > > Regards, > Branden > > [0] https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2013-December/006113.html > [1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man1/troff.1 > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday > [3] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7 > [4] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/Unix_4.0/Volume_1/00_Annotated_Table_of_Contents.pdf > (p. 2) > [5] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/Unix_4.0/Volume_1/C.1.2_NROFF_TROFF_Users_Manual.pdf > (p. 34)