From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ggm@algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2017 19:40:00 -0700 Subject: Unix witticisms In-Reply-To: <001001d33f14$bbfe0900$33fa1b00$@ronnatalie.com> References: <1507105846.59d49c3693e82@www.paradise.net.nz> <20171006160108.GA3799@darioniedermann.it> <001001d33f14$bbfe0900$33fa1b00$@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: Mike Lesk told me, (so this is now officially apocryphal because its friend-of-a-friend) that TBL had stuff in there, to specifically address a faulty throw-back action in the linotronic output device, and thats why troff/tbl output on more modern things like the wet process benson varian printer we had, drew some of the lines out of whack: it was adjusting for another typesetters mechanical positioning faults. I'd love to know if this is true. I did look under the hood at T/Roff and it was indescribably weirder than I imagined. I thought the macros were weird, then I discovered what the expanded to. On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:33 PM, Ron Natalie wrote: > "Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but is utterly frozen " appeared in the V6 man pages. > > This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being "utterly frozen." > The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the user's home dir. > Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is utterly frozen." > > For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm (his initials). > This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its programmers. > > Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware "Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with the idea. > I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator. I got an immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud. > >