From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_SIGNED,DKIM_VALID, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 18990 invoked from network); 12 Feb 2021 05:23:46 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 12 Feb 2021 05:23:46 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 4EAFF9C861; Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:23:44 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 617D79C6CF; Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:22:57 +1000 (AEST) Authentication-Results: minnie.tuhs.org; dkim=pass (2048-bit key; unprotected) header.d=algebras-org.20150623.gappssmtp.com header.i=@algebras-org.20150623.gappssmtp.com header.b="rnddPKVs"; dkim-atps=neutral Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id D11009C6CF; Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:22:52 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mail-lf1-f45.google.com (mail-lf1-f45.google.com [209.85.167.45]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 2AF189C2E5 for ; Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:22:51 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mail-lf1-f45.google.com with SMTP id b2so11500243lfq.0 for ; Thu, 11 Feb 2021 21:22:51 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=algebras-org.20150623.gappssmtp.com; s=20150623; h=mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date:message-id:subject:to; bh=CXbZromD9RtGFP46WcFCWrGf4wTHAibVVfaOID+4JMI=; b=rnddPKVsnbt/sYYyjQYrVjwSodK0RQsQ1HVgHtYkklh/3n986JRpPf6RExv6SoRjHR xBH/roXYjB8oz2qLqYM/Kv2VoRyE7XpBV7xADMatwT55D+2UprUFHapg1NxX3khH6r5K WZXVAZML7ItM6N8vdoBzv30skZOSVJ+gmHiaUWap4zc34LnGC7riRkwQrCzWUSh6t/sO fAvAwfK6v93jPNeJcwxuGjcq3tV529dDq7/oI5OnDOmgFUdVCZtiA9En+CiIwtqb8Xko i/Lv95acakvp8kjwQun3desoimFJo9rGm21fSOZyfPLQBryKyHGVIBoViNlqVQIaMVUa Safg== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20161025; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date :message-id:subject:to; bh=CXbZromD9RtGFP46WcFCWrGf4wTHAibVVfaOID+4JMI=; b=Z28v27JkMEsphqvOJfMoWWDhbeE6qEb5l4mPsu2NJ6elFkuiccZHAedKcGZfdb8Pwl 10hqidook49+DbChmTnj8b63C/HwDdaIBhkztn2TVBrJpT2COpcx3MKScoFZ/v9VYNEC grGFeQNHm+Ao/Z5ffbsk4qgKcN/apbdsJebAb2g9Ee2Pj3LMJ5FSiq5/r/TnlvUgw4Qg 5XkmjsKrh9NtrKQj9vxP+0JrnhRDUsXJoFb0IXf6Isya3uJvgsoiByCx4llttXgj7X9O AWdROaaLHNipNP/Kx5Y8z9iwkA+2k9E9wPb7334nWT19CV2D5nFAlA/9ml7hL4/n5JKD Oiwg== X-Gm-Message-State: AOAM533FnLZDjRCpAVPla0kU/ea/p0p9uCjbZo7IQPgGl7vF68bl1DKO Ne7+cvR8MQWyHYgoezbaWPSc2/FaeqNc9NVUXX+XvLW8mVM= X-Google-Smtp-Source: ABdhPJxQQ8oVtRXsE9CK1NULzLWbxQhZwGMXeOeIh2diLsNcDJUNBZYWWbs/UMvrc4YivdkdAnIgNmaAOAtwF3dkmik= X-Received: by 2002:a19:5206:: with SMTP id m6mr679097lfb.42.1613107368364; Thu, 11 Feb 2021 21:22:48 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <8b580c46-ecfb-9383-ed43-08108b3ee7bf@tllds.com> <20201130163753.GB18187@mcvoy.com> In-Reply-To: From: George Michaelson Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:22:37 +1000 Message-ID: To: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Subject: Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976)) X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" the transition from wet to dry was amazing. we had the wet, and it worked but was fussy. I think it was some odd DPI like 120. Lowish res. Jaggies on the fonts. I printed a poem Dave Barron wrote about the birth of the ICL 2900 hundred in old english font, you can see the jaggies on it. When it first comes out, it is shiny like its just been given birth to (sorry) and some horrendous solvent I don't want to think about evaporated, and it was done. Sort-of shiny surface. Not very nice. The first decent dry laser we got was a canon unit, which IIRC was in that olivetti "we know how do do design" space-age orange shade. It was a giant brick on its end, about the height of a bar-fridge, and it was 200dpi I think, and we loved it. Insanely good to get things that clean, and not have to slice a roll of paper. I mean, for the entire time we've been talking about Xerox machines were coming down in size although a campus printer at the bindery for PhDs is an assembly line of giant car sized units, but even the small ones the engineers have a black diver case of wierd tools, gizmos to reach behind the thingamajig and tickle the whatsit with a hairy brush.. they are seriously complex machines (or were). Getting one of these russian-tanks in a jet-age orange italian designer bar-fridge was .. cool. But then.. we realised all the s/w tools we were using were designed for US letter. Inches. Not A4 friendly. I mean, the BSD licence I've referred to several times, It was printed on legal, it even had the honest-to-god crimped red seal of the regents of the university of california on it, we didn't have envelopes which fitted this stuff. We didn't have ring binders with holes in the right places for the printed manuals, and when we printed our own, if we didn't check and check and check, the US-Legal / A4 thing went bananas. People hoarded magic init sequences to make things have margins and page sizes which worked for them. I still remember trying to co-erce 2up printing to work nicely. We were so desperate for decent output there was a market for a sort of 'player piano' box which sat on an IBM golfball printer, and hammered the keys for you. Daisy wheel was good, but you can't beat an IBM selectric if you want to cut a roneostat for some agitprop (they were the invention of the devil too. the ink goes everywhere) Nowadays, a good photocopier from fuji has a 48MP camera with a giant lens, there is none of this scanning nonsense, its one photo and done. The smarts are in MIPS chips and do things like hide 'you leaked it' codes in the printed output. I used one to copy my passport for a re-issuance recently, I swear you could pass money from them (I am told they have image recognition for money and won't print it. Damn skynet. they're taking over already) On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 7:59 AM Greg A. Woods wrote: > > At Wed, 10 Feb 2021 17:05:57 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > Subject: Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976)) > > > > On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 3:49 PM Greg A. Woods wrote: > > > > > I would like to try once again to dispell the apparent myth that troff > > > was readily available to Unix users in wider circles. > > > > > Hard to call it a myth - it was quite available. In fact, I never used a > > single mainstream UNIX system from DEC, IBM, HP later Sun, Masscomp, Apollo > > that did not have it, and many if not all small systems did also. > > I was much deeper in the trenches! (and in Canada too) > > I'm talking about small old systems, usually at very small companies but > sometimes at very small departments in larger companies. Things like > early Motorola 68k, NCR-Tower, Convergent, Plexus, Spectrix (plus Tandy > and Altos and other Xenix-based ports). Even with full licenses the > available nroff/troff package was often not installed as all too often > there wasn't enough spare disk space to install it. > > Also with newer AT&T Unix ports, i.e. Release 2 and newer, it depended > very much on the vendor, and sometimes even the distributor, as to > whether or not the Documenter's Workbench would be a separate purchase > or not, but usually it was and most of the customers I worked with would > never pay for software that they didn't have a pressing need for, even > if it was just a few $100. > > > Yes, but after Tom Ferrin created vcat(1) in the late 1970s ('77 I think, > > but I've forgotten). Many people did have access to a plotter which cost > > about $1k in the late 1970s, or even later a 'wet' laser printer like the > > Imagen which cost about $5K a few years later. > > I don't know if I've ever seen a Versatec plotter, though perhaps at a > trade show. > > I seem to remember grad students at university getting typeset copy off > some kind of "wet" process typesetter driven by troff -- maybe even a > C/A/T, but that was so far out of reach of undergrads that it wasn't > even funny -- we just had a dot-matrix line printer (for the Unix > machine -- there were real line printers on the Multics machine). > > Later on most of the kinds of customers I worked with would have a > daisy-wheel printer at best, or perhaps just a dot-matrix line printer. > That is until the HP Laserjet came along, followed of course not much > longer by the Apple LaserWriter. > > > No offense, but that's just not true. Line printers and nroff were used a > > great deal to prep things, and often UNIX folks had access to a daisy shell > > printer for higher quality nroff output, much less using the line printer. > > Yeah, sure, lots of us Unix fans used nroff, but I doubt I ever had any > small-system customers who used it, or would even know how to use it, > nor would they want to learn how to use it, especially if they already > had paid for a "proper" word processor.... > > > > People would install Wordstar long before they even thought about using > > > nroff. > > > > > I did not know anyone that did that. But I'll take your word for it. > > Wordstar as I recall ran on 8-bit PCs. > > Sorry, probably it was WordPerfect or something work-alike. > > The most recent site I remember using such a word processor on Unix was > on an NCR-Tower32, which by then would have been running a newer Unix > System V, probably Release 2, though maybe I upgraded them to Release 3 > or whatever was current from NCR in the day, but I don't remember the > details. They printed to a laser, probably as PCL. That would have > been in the very early 1990s. > > > FWIW: my non-techie CMU course > > professors used to let you turning papers printed off the line printer and > > people used anything they had - which was Scribe on the 20s and nroff on > > the Unix, boxes and I've forgotten the name of the program that ran on the > > TSS, which the business majors like my roommate tended to use. > > I remember learning the old "roff" on a PDP-11/60 (which was by then > running V7) and submitting course work hand-cut from 132-column fan-fold > paper. I also remember being disappointed when they "replaced" it with > nroff (probably it had just been an old v6 binary) and I had to learn > how to format everything all over again. :-) > > > > > but IF And Only IF you had a C compiler _and_ > > > the skill to install it. That combination was still incredibly rare. > > > > Excuse me... most end-users sites had them. > > > > It sounds like your early UNIX experiences were in a limited version, which > > is a little sad and I can see that might color your thinking. > > There were a great number of small sites running various different ports > of Unix -- many of which were purpose-built to run some application such > as an accounting system or word processing system. > > Often the owners didn't even really know they were running Unix or some > derivative. If the compiler was an add-on they certainly didn't have > it, even if it was a free add-on. > > I think Microsoft Xenix for example always had an add-on compiler > (though perhaps some of its many sub-licensees would bundle it), and of > course by the time AT&T Unix System V came out the compiler (i.e. SGS) > and DWB were both add-ons that took up disk space and were usually added > $$$ too. > > > Hmmm ... you were complaining you need a C compiler for ditroff, yet groff > > needs C++ IIRC.? > > Plain C for "psroff", but yes, indeed, C++ for groff. > > > My guess this observation is because HP was late to the Postscript world > > and there while the eventual hpcat(1) was done for the vaxen and made it > > the USENET, it was fairly late in time, and > > I don't think I ever heard of hpcat, and I can only find one reference > to it online with google (in an old 1985 Los Alamos newsletter). > > > I'm not sure if anyone at HP or > > anyone else ever wrote a ditroff backend for HP's PCL. > > Rick Richardson wrote Jetroff. The second release became commercial > software, but I briefly used the original 1.0 "shareware" release quite > successfully: > > https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.sources.misc/1988-September/thread.html > > > The key is that Apple Laserwriters were pretty cheap and since they already > > did PS, most sites I knew just bought PS based ones and did not go HP until > > later when PS was built-in. > > My best ever used equipment deal (where I paid actual $$$), was for an > almost brand-new Apple LaserWriter 16/600 that had come off lease at a > PC leasing agency in Toronto. They didn't know heads or tails about any > kind of Apple gear and didn't know how to get the Ethernet adapter for > it. I paid just $64.00. It was still on its first toner cartridge. I > drove away like I'd robbed the place! Before that I had a cranky old > monster of a PS printer of some kind -- it has a 10MB 5.25" hard drive > in it that I think contained the fonts. > > -- > Greg A. Woods > > Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack > Planix, Inc. Avoncote Farms