I had an idea. I asked Tom Duff, Mike Tilson, Bill Reeves to help me put together tools and font digitizations to "print" nroff output to the Versatec plotter one weekend in early 1978. Ron Baecker, their adviser, came in Monday morning furious that they had been hacking instead of working on their thesis. When he saw what we were doing, his tone changed completely and he asked if he could use it to send out a grant application he was working on. I used it for my 4th year optics thesis, which caused my prof to say I had obviously plagiarized it from somewhere, because there was otherwise no way to produce something that looked like that (Xeroxed Versatec paper). I had to work hard to convince him I had not cheated.

Later that year we, mostly Bill, coupled it to troff, along with some digitized fonts, and it went out on the Toronto tapes, with our names on it. For many years I saw evidence in scientific papers of people using Bill's digitization of the Bodoni fonts.

This is where it gets interesting.

Berkeley took it, tweaked it some - improved it yes, but it was substantially our code - and shipped it out, with our names removed and "Copyright the Regents of the University of California" across the top. I was seriously pissed but there was really nothing I could do about it. Years later I finally asked Joy about it, and his unapologetic answer was their lawyers didn't want our names on their software so they dropped them.

When Dennis Ritchie and Greg Chesson - together, yikes - were interviewing me for my job at Bell Labs, Dennis, holding my resume, asked why I had had worked on Versatec support for nroff and troff when Berkeley had already done it. I believe the force of my reply helped convince them I was worth hiring.

Years later, bless him, Henry Spencer said something on Usenet explaining why the "Berkeley typesetting software" was missing the names of those who created it. He was in the lab that weekend and saw it happen.

-rob


On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 1:25 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
As far as I know, Tom Ferrin wrote the original in the late 1970s - it is on the original UCSF tape as part of his UNIX graphics tools.   That said, Joy may have passed it along on the BSD tapes also. It's called "vcat" and converts Wang C/A/T codes to plotter strokes on a smaller (11/12in wide IIRC) Varian (originally) and small Versatec [wet / kerosene style] plotter using the 200 bpi Hershey fonts that the CMU/MIT/Stanford XGP had used.   IIRC, UCB had a large format Versatec (36"/48") and the UCB version could do N pages at a time.   In the Adobe 'transcript' package is a similar program (based on Tom work) but outputs using Adobe Fonts.    

It might take some searching "foo" to find them, but Tom's program is what most of us used back in the day before the Imagen and later Apple LaserWriter - particularly after having had access to an XGP or a Xerox Dover in college ;-)
ᐧ

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 6:10 PM David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:
> On 9 Mar 2023, at 03:30, Angelo Papenhoff <aap@papnet.eu> wrote:

…

> And even then one would need CAT emulation, which I
> haven't bothered with yet.

That sounds like a fun project — is there really no such beast already?




d