Re: [TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history

[Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>]

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Dennis spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the troff code in the late
1980s, if I remember right, moving it to modern C. He got annoyed by it one
day. It was the "ditroff" variant although honestly I don't remember us
ever calling it that. It was just the current version of troff. Not sure
where the name came from. Perhaps it was us but I think of it as a foreign
name.

-rob


On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 11:05 AM Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> 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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