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