[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Rudi Blom]

>From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
>To: tuhs at tuhs.org
>Cc: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
>Subject: Re: [TUHS] Who used *ROFF?
>Message-ID: <20180512110127.0B81418C08E at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
>
 <snip>
>Are you familiar with the description in Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of
>the Unix Time-sharing System":
>
>  https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.htm
>
<snip>

Please note the URL should end with ".html", not ".htm"

I wasted 5 minutes (insert big grin) wondering why I got an 404 like

404 Not Found
Code: NoSuchKey
Message: The specified key does not exist.
Key: hist.htm
RequestId: 454E36190753F99C
HostId: 6EJTsEdvnbnAr4VO7+mxSWH+dcX8X6AGRLZxwOLha/9q5G2CAxsVbEw6aMF+NHIPbhrAQ+/t/8o=

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 25 May 2018, aksr wrote:

>> I believe there was one bug, which was found by John Mackin at Sydney 
>> University many years ago so the code I have has that documented, well, 
>> patched.
>
> If it's possible, I would like to see that code.

RIP John "Iron Bar" Mackin; he and I had some memorable fights, over on 
aus.flame...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[aksr]

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 09:12:22AM +1000, Noel Hunt wrote:
> I have built ideal several times over the years. I have
> only tested it on the samples in the manual, in particular
> the diagram Brian Kernighan used for the 'cbt' documentation.
> I believe there was one bug, which was found by John Mackin
> at Sydney University many years ago so the code I have has
> that documented, well, patched.

If it's possible, I would like to see that code.


Thanks,
Alexander

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Blake McBride]

We laugh, but I've found that it can be true (up-hill in both directions)!
Let me explain...

I used to ride my bicycle around the top of a large hill.  It went up and
down, but I ended up in the same place that I started.  One would think
that, since I ended up in the same place, I necessarily went up-hill and
down-hill the same amount - but not true!

It took me an hour to ride around that hill.  The up-hill parts were hard
and I went slowly.  The down-hill parts were fast and easy.  Turns out, I'd
spend 45 minutes going up-hill and 15 minutes going-down-hill.  Not equal!
So, while I may have "theoretically" went up and down the same amount.  In
terms of time and my perceptions, it was up-hill most of the way!

Blake McBride


On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 10:19 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 12 May 2018, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>
> <accent=Irish>
>>
>> And you tell that to the young people of today. and they won't believe
>> you.
>>
>
> Arrgghh!  It was the four *Yorkshiremen*, of course...
>
> -- Dave
>
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 15 May 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:

>> I like the manpage format!  It tells me everything I need to know, in 
>> the correct order, and it's in good old plain ASCII...
>
> +1 - DocBook does nothing for me but it appears that I'm losing that 
> argument. The kids will get the mess they deserve I suppose.

Proof by example: "TERM= man man" i.e. turn off all possible highlighting 
etc, and it's still readable (but you do get a warning about your terminal 
not being fully functional or something - big deal).  Try doing *that* 
with your fancy doc system...

I've forgotten who designed the "man" format (JFO?) but it's great, and they
deserved some sort of an award for it.

As for the kids of today, well, eventually they'll learn that their kids 
in turn will get to choose their nursing home :-)

-- Dave, not quite old enough for a nursing home yet

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Tue, 15 May 2018, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote:

> Early unixes had dsw: Delete by SWitch register.

Needed because the file system was then so !@#›%-up that "rm" wouldn't 
work, so the i-number had to be keyed in.

It was also known as Delete Sh*t Work :-)

I think that "clri" was written shortly thereafterwards; I have a paper on 
its use somewhere in the archives, from around the 70-80s.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 09:45:08AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Tue, 15 May 2018, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> 
> >Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
> >moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
> >projects to make the switch.  Unfortunately, some have.  DocBook stinks
> >and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
> >when it and XML were still shiny.
> 
> I like the manpage format!  It tells me everything I need to know, in the
> correct order, and it's in good old plain ASCII...

+1 - DocBook does nothing for me but it appears that I'm losing that argument.
The kids will get the mess they deserve I suppose.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 15 May 2018, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

> Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source 
> moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing 
> projects to make the switch.  Unfortunately, some have.  DocBook stinks 
> and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back 
> when it and XML were still shiny.

I like the manpage format!  It tells me everything I need to know, in the 
correct order, and it's in good old plain ASCII...

Unfortunately it seems that the youngsters of today (i.e. those with no 
sense of Unix history whatsoever) have been suckled on this Whizzy-Wig 
stuff.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Noel Hunt]

I have built ideal several times over the years. I have
only tested it on the samples in the manual, in particular
the diagram Brian Kernighan used for the 'cbt' documentation.
I believe there was one bug, which was found by John Mackin
at Sydney University many years ago so the code I have has
that documented, well, patched.


On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 9:05 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > I still find pic really useful ...  > I don't know of any other tool
> that lets you do drawings like that
>
> Unix had "ideal", a remarkable language by Chris Van Wyk, based on complex
> numbers and capable of some constraint solving. Its code seemed to be
> lost but can now be found in one of the online v10 repositories. I've
> been meaning to try to resurrect it. If anyone has already done so,
> I'd love to hear about it.
>
> I, too, have some pic macros, though no big coherent packages, to do
> things like  polar coordinates and solving for the intersection of lines
> and circles. I have even in extremis made filled triangles with scripts
> that massage PostScript by deleting corners of filled rectangles. Then
> from triangles you can, with patience, make polygons.
>
> Doug
>
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Doug McIlroy]

> I still find pic really useful ...  > I don't know of any other tool
that lets you do drawings like that

Unix had "ideal", a remarkable language by Chris Van Wyk, based on complex
numbers and capable of some constraint solving. Its code seemed to be
lost but can now be found in one of the online v10 repositories. I've
been meaning to try to resurrect it. If anyone has already done so,
I'd love to hear about it.

I, too, have some pic macros, though no big coherent packages, to do
things like  polar coordinates and solving for the intersection of lines
and circles. I have even in extremis made filled triangles with scripts
that massage PostScript by deleting corners of filled rectangles. Then
from triangles you can, with patience, make polygons.

Doug

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 14 May 2018 19:22:58 -0700 Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
Jon Steinhart writes:
> Bakul Shah writes:
> > On Tue, 15 May 2018 11:21:22 +1000 Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> > Dave Horsfall writes:
> > > On Sat, 12 May 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.
> > > 
> > > I boss I used to work for insisted that we all learn "ed", because one day
> > > it might be the only editor available to you; well, one day he was right,
> > > when /usr on a client's box got creamed after a head crash...
> >
> > Your boss must've been an optimist.
> >
> > I once had to rescue a system where the root dir block was
> > lost.  No ed.  Luckily our bootrom had commands for peek/poke
> > & disk block IO.  The v7 filesystem layout was simple enough
> > and I remembered enough of it that I was able to patch it
> > enough to bring it up and run fsck.
> 
> If we're gonna get into "when I was young" stories we need to get
> back to repairing filesystems from the front panel switches.

:-)

My point was when Murphy's Law  strikes, you can't rely having
even "ed".  And it did strike us at a bad time -- 24 hours
before our flight to Las Vegas (for Comdex) where we wanted to
show off our *only* working prototype computer.

As for entering stuff from the front panel switches, my first
boss in Silicon Valley had told me that as a postdoc he had
entered an experimental *compiler* through the front panel
switches on a Minsk-2!  I never got around to asking him for
the details though.

[Minsk-2 was a discrete transistor Russian computer, with 4K
of 37 bit words. I/O via paper tape.]

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[arnold]

> Arnold wrote:
> > DocBook. Bleah.

Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
> Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
> moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
> projects to make the switch.  Unfortunately, some have.  DocBook stinks
> and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
> when it and XML were still shiny.
>
> He argues that decent-quality output, e.g. PDF, isn't required any more.

He's wrong about that, and also that DocBook is wonderful. It's great
for machine processing (which is why O'Reilly likes it) but it's AWFUL
for the human author.

In fact, it's so bad that these days O'Reilly uses AsciiDoc with a
toolchain to convert to DocBook for printing.

> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7998

Interesting reading (I skimmed it), but I will never switch any of
my man pages over to DocBook.

My two cents (as we wander even further afield),

Arnold

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:33 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:56 AM, Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
>> moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
>> projects to make the switch.  Unfortunately, some have.  DocBook stinks
>> and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
>> when it and XML were still shiny.
>>
> xkcd on Standards <https://xkcd.com/927/>  (And the Gnu guys have their
> doc standard ...)
>
> Things are more like the are today then they have ever been before."
> Dwight David Eisenhower ​
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>

I recently committed a fix to FreeBSD that made booting a little less
verbose. Seems like on EC3 the scrolling is painfully slow. By removing the
one-line-per-core/thread (well, 5 lines) I was able to speed up boot times
40%. My comment was 'The more things change, the more it's 1985 again' when
I was doing similar hacks to make programs run faster when run from the
Decwriter II in the lap connected at 300 baud...

Warner
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:56 AM, Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk>
wrote:

>
> Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
> moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
> projects to make the switch.  Unfortunately, some have.  DocBook stinks
> and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
> when it and XML were still shiny.
>
xkcd on Standards <https://xkcd.com/927/>  (And the Gnu guys have their doc
standard ...)

Things are more like the are today then they have ever been before."
Dwight David Eisenhower ​
ᐧ
ᐧ
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Arnold wrote:
> Clem wrote:
> > wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the books - I still
> > have my copy.   Tim took it with him when he created O'Reilly.

Tim talks about Masscomp and the start of O'Reilly.
https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/5cw5z69qZPg

> DocBook. Bleah.

Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch.  Unfortunately, some have.  DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.

He argues that decent-quality output, e.g. PDF, isn't required any more.
(I like man pages I'm reading from top to bottom in higher resolution
than a TTY, e.g. perl(1) when you could learn it from its single page.)
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7998

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55 AM, Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I
still
> > > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use
it to
> > > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> > >
> > > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> >
> > I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came
with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it
was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
>
> The PWB children used -mm  I seem to remember that the base system 3 and
maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If
you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.

Maybe that's what it was. Let's see, System V's I have known and loathed[*]:

AIX on RT and RS/6k, Irix, HP-UX, UNISYS, Solaris 2.x for x in 2-5; perhaps
others that I can't recall now.

Perhaps it was one of them? For some reason, AIX is sticking out in my head
as not having the full compliment of troff macros as supplied by BSD
distributions. Something *definitely* didn't come with -me, though I can't
recall what now.

        - Dan C.

[*] "Loathed" is entirely too strong of a word, but in the enthusiasm of
first exposure combined with the headiness (read: ignorance) of youth, it
was easy to fall prey to the tribalism of the pro-BSD people on my campus;
the response was less rational and more emotional. That said, we've covered
in great depth on this list how Solaris 2.x, in particular, was rushed to
market too early; attempts at conversion from SunOS 4.x were fraught and
that left a bad taste for some time. Like wanting to wear the same jacket
as a rock star, wanting to run the same software as one's idols was an
attempt to gather some amount of cachet that was unwarranted. But just as
the music I listened to when I was 8 years old was dramatically different
than the music that I liked at 13, which is still somewhat removed from
that which I listen to most often now (though curiously there is much more
continuity there), I find that I wouldn't really want to go back to SunOS 4
on a SPARCstation 1, let alone 4.3BSD on a VAX, even with a relatively nice
HP or DEC terminal.
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem cole]

The PWB children used -mm  I seem to remember that the base system 3 and maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.    

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
> > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
> > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> >
> > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> 
> I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I
still
> > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it
to
> > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
>
> Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac

I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came
with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it
was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[arnold]

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> We added a few Macro's to it for some books, but pretty much used it as it
> is for basic documents.   Janet Egan, Steve Talbot and someone else who's
> name I've forgotten, wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the
> books - I still have my copy.   Tim took it with him when he created
> O'Reilly.   All of the original 'NutShell' books and the set that got the
> O'Reilly empire started (the X11 stuff) was all Masscomp superset of -ms.

They were still using this circa 1997; I did the update of sed&awk in
troff, but by then O'Reilly had switched to DocBook. They converted
the book to DocBook, but actually printed it by running it through
some hairy perl scripts that turned it *back* into troff -ms + their
additional macros!

It was a mess, but eventually the book got printed.

As an aside, they still use DocBook, but with a more rational printing
engine. Nevertheless, something simple like:

	short	Text text text text
		Text text text text

	long item here
		Text text text text
		Text text text text

which troff handled with ease takes a lot of tweaking and style sheets
and Heaven-knows-what-else to do in DocBook. Bleah.

Arnold

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[arnold]

Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?
>
> Indeed. My error. 
>
> The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
> lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
> packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
> too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
> sense of design.
>
> Doug

OK, much thanks.

I like -ms, but if I was going to write a book with nested lists
and so on, I'd use -mm.

Arnold

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Nemo]

On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
> preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
> this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).

Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 8:52 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

>
> > Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?
>
> Indeed. My error.

​You tell me, but I always understood/was lead to believe, they were
related i.e. -man and -ms​ took from each other. Don't Lesk have his hand
in both?



>
>
> The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
> lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
> packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
> too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
> sense of design.
>
​Amen...​

​It's always been the most straight forward of any I have known.

We added a few Macro's to it for some books, but pretty much used it as it
is for basic documents.   Janet Egan, Steve Talbot and someone else who's
name I've forgotten, wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the
books - I still have my copy.   Tim took it with him when he created
O'Reilly.   All of the original 'NutShell' books and the set that got the
O'Reilly empire started (the X11 stuff) was all Masscomp superset of -ms.

Clem

​
ᐧ
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Doug McIlroy]

> Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?

Indeed. My error. 

The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
sense of design.

Doug

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Doug McIlroy]

Me too.

Larry McVoy wrote:

> On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:19:50AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.
>
> And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the
> others, I like -ms best).

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

> On May 15, 2018, at 3:27, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On May 14, 2018, at 7:22 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>> 
>> If we're gonna get into "when I was young" stories we need to get
>> back to repairing filesystems from the front panel switches.
> 
> s/repairing/entering/

Early unixes had dsw: Delete by SWitch register.

	jaap

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 14 May 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I watched Neil Lincoln do that on an ETA-10.  Really did, though it 
> wasn't fsck, it was just the boot sequence.

We had to do that on the Cyber 72 all the time, on its "dead start" panel.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 07:27:26PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> 
> > On May 14, 2018, at 7:22 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> > 
> > If we're gonna get into "when I was young" stories we need to get
> > back to repairing filesystems from the front panel switches.
> 
> s/repairing/entering/

I watched Neil Lincoln do that on an ETA-10.  Really did, though it wasn't
fsck, it was just the boot sequence.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> On May 14, 2018, at 7:22 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> If we're gonna get into "when I was young" stories we need to get
> back to repairing filesystems from the front panel switches.

s/repairing/entering/

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Jon Steinhart]

Bakul Shah writes:
> On Tue, 15 May 2018 11:21:22 +1000 Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> Dave Horsfall writes:
> > On Sat, 12 May 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.
> > 
> > I boss I used to work for insisted that we all learn "ed", because one day 
> > it might be the only editor available to you; well, one day he was right, 
> > when /usr on a client's box got creamed after a head crash...
>
> Your boss must've been an optimist.
>
> I once had to rescue a system where the root dir block was
> lost.  No ed.  Luckily our bootrom had commands for peek/poke
> & disk block IO.  The v7 filesystem layout was simple enough
> and I remembered enough of it that I was able to patch it
> enough to bring it up and run fsck.

If we're gonna get into "when I was young" stories we need to get
back to repairing filesystems from the front panel switches.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Bakul Shah]

On Tue, 15 May 2018 11:21:22 +1000 Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
Dave Horsfall writes:
> On Sat, 12 May 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> 
> > I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.
> 
> I boss I used to work for insisted that we all learn "ed", because one day 
> it might be the only editor available to you; well, one day he was right, 
> when /usr on a client's box got creamed after a head crash...

Your boss must've been an optimist.

I once had to rescue a system where the root dir block was
lost.  No ed.  Luckily our bootrom had commands for peek/poke
& disk block IO.  The v7 filesystem layout was simple enough
and I remembered enough of it that I was able to patch it
enough to bring it up and run fsck.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> On May 14, 2018, at 6:21 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> I boss I used to work for insisted that we all learn "ed", because one day it might be the only editor available to you; well, one day he was right, when /usr on a client's box got creamed after a head crash...

What I always find odd is the bunch moaning about ed(1) being obsolete, obtuse, and hard to learn, tend to have a healthy stock of sed(1) scripts they ran hourly if not more often.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 12 May 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.

I boss I used to work for insisted that we all learn "ed", because one day 
it might be the only editor available to you; well, one day he was right, 
when /usr on a client's box got creamed after a head crash...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Ron Natalie]

CAT = Computer Assisted Typesetter.   It was built by a company called
Graphic Systems (GSI).    It was the original device troff was done for.
Many of the original troff limitations go to the fact it was driving this
device:  there are only four fonts.   These are held on film strips on a
drum.   Not the most sophisticated font system, but ahead of its time.   It
had only been on the market for two years when the labs got it and wrote
troff.

I believe the one we had access to (and used for the previously mentioned
versatec emulation) was at the Naval Research Laboratory.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 14 May 2018, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?

Wow!  What a beautiful machine...  Now I understand the "four fonts" 
stuff.

Thanks, all.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 5:32 PM, Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>
>
> Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.
>
>
> No.
>
> What I remember, there was first roff written in assembler.  It was
> then rewrittn into C (but now with real macro capabilities.  roff
> has a lt build in), Typesetter C appeared in Edition 6.1 (of 6.2)
> since the n/troff code demanded a lot from the C-compiler.  To make
> it possible to run it on a pdp11 there was the hack turning data
> into test (for the hyphenation tables).  Ditroff was done by bwk
> to be devie independent.
>
> Regards,
>
> jaap
>
> ​Thanks -- this make sense and it the piece that I could not remember.  ​

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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

> Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.


No.

What I remember, there was first roff written in assembler.  It was
then rewrittn into C (but now with real macro capabilities.  roff
has a lt build in), Typesetter C appeared in Edition 6.1 (of 6.2)
since the n/troff code demanded a lot from the C-compiler.  To make
it possible to run it on a pdp11 there was the hack turning data
into test (for the hyphenation tables).  Ditroff was done by bwk
to be devie independent.

Regards,

	jaap

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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 1:13 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk>
>
>     >> This is also were typesetter C comes from.
>
>     > What's that?
>
> An evolution of C past the fairly early version in V6, but prior
> to V7. Reputedly the name comes from extensions done for doing troff.
>

​Right -- what gets a little messy is that you need to understand the
*roff, the C compiler and the base OS were all being changed and released
in parallel of each other.   How different features made it into the wild
was not linear.

I mentioned the roff to nroff to troff to ditroff stream earlier today.
What I do not remember is the independent troff releases.   I think I
remember that there was an early troff that went out independent of one of
the kernels.  The problem is that like Noel I know we had it at CMU and
UCB, but I do not remember its provenance.   As Noel points out, few of us
outside of Bell Labs had C/A/T typesetters.   But there was  C/A/T
typesetter emulator for the Versatec and Variam plotters called 'vcat'
which converted the typesetter codes into pixels for the plotter and used
the 'Hershey Fonts' which were the first generally available bit maps
around at I believe 200 dpi [this was originally distributed in an early
USENIX tape IICR and later came out as part of 2 or 3 BSD -- I believe Tom
Ferrin at UCSF had his hand in its creation].

As Noel and I have talk about in the past, V6 beget PWB 1.0 - the former
from MH and the later out of Whippany IIRC - and there are some small
difference in the kernels.  Ken and Dennis​ continued there kernel work at
MH and a number of kernel changes were done by them that were substantial
from V6 -- this kernel is generally called the UNIX/TS kernel.

There was never an official UNIX/TS release, but it `leaked' from MH
primarily by the AT&T employees on their OYOC year [One Year On Campus - or
some times One Year in California ;-)    For instance Ted brought it to us
at CMU and Noel and team had that kernel at MIT.      UNIX/TS would become
the basis of the kernel that went out in V7; with a number of other
additions and changes.

Dennis and Steve of course were working on changes to the language.   These
compilers would come out inside of AT&T as needed but we less available
directly to the rest of us.   Again how they made it outside was sometimes
a tad random.   Sometime, I want to say 1976-77 time frame Dennis and Brian
were also writing the 'White Book' - aka K&R [again I saw a xerographic
draft that Ted had at the time and wishes it had been around a few years
earlier].   Please remember that until the publishing of K&R there was not
stdio in the language (v6 had the portable C library a precursor and there
were some others).

As I said, the typesetter (troff) support was available independent of the
OS at one point for V6 (and inside the Bell System PWB 1.0).    K&R had not
yet been published but that version of troff needed stdio, IIRC.  So as
part of the package, the version of the Ritchie Compiler that could compile
it was included in the distribution by AT&T.   This version was >>close<<
to the C that would be come out in V7 but not 100% the same compiler.
Hence it is referred to as 'typesetter C.'

A versions of ditroff would be released that did not include the C
compiler, because by that point the language was wide spread.

What I do not remember is which version of troff was included in the
original 'typesetter' distribution.   I want to say it was troff not
ditroff, but I have forgotten.

Clem

ᐧ
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 14 May 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:

> And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the 
> others, I like -ms best).

I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still 
preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to 
this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).

I used to joke that the only way that I'll write in -mm is if I was paid 
to do so :-)  And it won't be cheap...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Warner Losh]

>
> I've successfully used troff to write our commercial contract.
> I collaborated with a guy at Fenwick&West, taught him enough troff -ms
> that he could make changes.  We sourced 6 different contracts from one doc
> and the lawyer *loved* that, he really wanted that fuctionality in Word.
>

I may need to start doing that for the routine leases I do for some rental
property I own. I lamely just do some word fill in the blank things now,
but I may have to switch :)

Warner
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 11:18:48AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> arnold at skeeve.com writes:
> > Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in part):
> > > > Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
> > > > converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
> > > > won't do troff.
> > >
> > > I am curious about PHI.  Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and 
> > > says that all his books are written in troff).  Not much on the PHI website.
> > >
> > > N.
> >
> > This is getting off-topic.  Prentice Hall (Pearson) generally works with
> > Word but they are able to make allowance for other formats. For sure TeX,
> > and they can work with troff if the author wants to provide the "camera
> > ready copy" themselves (see, for example, Brian's book on Go, done with
> > groff).
> >
> > I wrote my PH book in Texinfo and the converted it to DocBook XML; they
> > used a contractor to actually go from there to typesettable copy.
> >
> > Arnold
> 
> Well, this issue, at least in my case, isn't troff per-se.  It's that editors
> and such want to be able to read test, make comments in the margins, and track
> changes.  I would claim that troff, tex, et. al. are great tools for people
> who write stuff and shepherd it to publication which is great for specs and
> technical papers and all that.  What's lacking is tools for the involvement
> of third-parties such as editors.

I've successfully used troff to write our commercial contract.
I collaborated with a guy at Fenwick&West, taught him enough troff -ms
that he could make changes.  We sourced 6 different contracts from one doc
and the lawyer *loved* that, he really wanted that fuctionality in Word.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Jon Steinhart]

arnold at skeeve.com writes:
> Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in part):
> > > Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
> > > converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
> > > won't do troff.
> >
> > I am curious about PHI.  Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and 
> > says that all his books are written in troff).  Not much on the PHI website.
> >
> > N.
>
> This is getting off-topic.  Prentice Hall (Pearson) generally works with
> Word but they are able to make allowance for other formats. For sure TeX,
> and they can work with troff if the author wants to provide the "camera
> ready copy" themselves (see, for example, Brian's book on Go, done with
> groff).
>
> I wrote my PH book in Texinfo and the converted it to DocBook XML; they
> used a contractor to actually go from there to typesettable copy.
>
> Arnold

Well, this issue, at least in my case, isn't troff per-se.  It's that editors
and such want to be able to read test, make comments in the margins, and track
changes.  I would claim that troff, tex, et. al. are great tools for people
who write stuff and shepherd it to publication which is great for specs and
technical papers and all that.  What's lacking is tools for the involvement
of third-parties such as editors.

Jon

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[arnold]

Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in part):
> > Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
> > converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
> > won't do troff.
>
> I am curious about PHI.  Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and 
> says that all his books are written in troff).  Not much on the PHI website.
>
> N.

This is getting off-topic.  Prentice Hall (Pearson) generally works with
Word but they are able to make allowance for other formats. For sure TeX,
and they can work with troff if the author wants to provide the "camera
ready copy" themselves (see, for example, Brian's book on Go, done with
groff).

I wrote my PH book in Texinfo and the converted it to DocBook XML; they
used a contractor to actually go from there to typesettable copy.

Arnold

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk>

    >> This is also were typesetter C comes from.

    > What's that?

An evolution of C past the fairly early version in V6, but prior
to V7. Reputedly the name comes from extensions done for doing troff.
See:

  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/history/unix/CChanges.txt
  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/history/unix/COChanges.txt

for some historical documentation.

	Noel

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 9:58 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Clem cole
>
>     > Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.
>
> Not so sure about that; we had that C at MIT, but only regular troff (which
> had been hacked to drive a Varian).
>
>     > From: Arnold Skeeve
>
>     > It seems to be shortly after the '78 release of V7.
>
> No, typesetter C definitely pre-dated V7. The 'PWB1' system at MIT had the
> new
> C.
>
> Looking at the documentation files for the extension (e.g. addition of
> 'long's), none of them have dates in them (alas), but my hard-copy
> printout of
> one is dated "May 8 1978", and it was several years old at that point.
>
> (Also, several sources give '79 for V7 - Salus says 'June 1979').
>

The kernels in the release tapes from TUHS are dated June 8, 1979. They are
the latest dated files in the archives (apart maybe from a few directories).

Warner
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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in part):
> Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
> converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
> won't do troff.

I am curious about PHI.  Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and 
says that all his books are written in troff).  Not much on the PHI website.

N.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Clem,

> This is also were typesetter C comes from.

What's that?

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem cole

    > Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.

Not so sure about that; we had that C at MIT, but only regular troff (which
had been hacked to drive a Varian).

    > From: Arnold Skeeve

    > It seems to be shortly after the '78 release of V7.

No, typesetter C definitely pre-dated V7. The 'PWB1' system at MIT had the new
C.

Looking at the documentation files for the extension (e.g. addition of
'long's), none of them have dates in them (alas), but my hard-copy printout of
one is dated "May 8 1978", and it was several years old at that point.

(Also, several sources give '79 for V7 - Salus says 'June 1979').

       Noel

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> +1 
>
> You should share your scripts, I've done similar stuff and other people
> have sometimes found it useful.
>
> I do the same thing with the invis stuff, super handy.

Well, they're all one-offs so not sure hoe generally useful they are.
Oh, one more great thing about pic is the ease at which other programs
can generate it; I do that a lot when a picture is produced from a pile
of data.

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

+1 

You should share your scripts, I've done similar stuff and other people
have sometimes found it useful.

I do the same thing with the invis stuff, super handy.

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:21:26AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> > BTW, I still find pic really useful, ...
> 
> I use pic all the time.  One of the things that I find most useful, which
> is unfortunately not supported by things like xfig, is invisible elements.
> I draw most complicated pictures by constructing scaffold of invisible items
> and hanging the visible items onto it.  That way, if I start running out of
> space I can just shrink the scaffold.  Sure beats having to rescale piles of
> elements and then move them around in WYSIWYG packages.
> 
> Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
> converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
> won't do troff.  Not a serious script as it just looks for macro names, it
> doesn't expand and interpret all of the low-level requests.  But, part of
> the script extracts pic images into separate files, runs them through groff,
> converts the output to PDF, converts that to SVG, runs it through inkscape
> in batch mode to crop excess whitespace from the image, and then imports it
> into the OpenOffice documents.  Of course, while SVG is the only vector
> graphics format that OpenOffic supports, it makes a mess of it and converts
> it to bitmaps internally.  But, it works with the publisher's production
> toolchain as they can work on the SVG images separately.
> 
> Once again, a testament to "little languages" and "composable tools".
> 
> Jon

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[arnold]

You may be right. It seems to be shortly after the '78 release of V7.
For the full story on ditroff, see Brian's papers on it at
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html .  They are fascinating
(and fun!) reading.

Arnold

Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.  
>
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
>
> > On May 14, 2018, at 10:45 AM, Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff.   Which begat new roff - aka  nroff.  both assume an ASR 37 as the output device.  When the first typesetter was procured typesetter roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is a binary format).    This is also were typesetter C comes from.   Note these are 3 separate and different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input language.  These were included in V5/6/7 IIRC 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff???s author,  Brian rewrote the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff which also could support ASCII output nroff style
> > 
> > This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.   
> > 
> > Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today???s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.  
> > 
> > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> > 
> >>> On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> Here's part of the story.
> >> 
> >> [...]
> >> 
> >> You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for their C/A/T photo-typesetter?  At least, that was the lore that I heard...
> >> 
> >> And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
> >> 
> >> -- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> BTW, I still find pic really useful, ...

I use pic all the time.  One of the things that I find most useful, which
is unfortunately not supported by things like xfig, is invisible elements.
I draw most complicated pictures by constructing scaffold of invisible items
and hanging the visible items onto it.  That way, if I start running out of
space I can just shrink the scaffold.  Sure beats having to rescale piles of
elements and then move them around in WYSIWYG packages.

Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
won't do troff.  Not a serious script as it just looks for macro names, it
doesn't expand and interpret all of the low-level requests.  But, part of
the script extracts pic images into separate files, runs them through groff,
converts the output to PDF, converts that to SVG, runs it through inkscape
in batch mode to crop excess whitespace from the image, and then imports it
into the OpenOffice documents.  Of course, while SVG is the only vector
graphics format that OpenOffic supports, it makes a mess of it and converts
it to bitmaps internally.  But, it works with the publisher's production
toolchain as they can work on the SVG images separately.

Once again, a testament to "little languages" and "composable tools".

Jon

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

BTW, I still find pic really useful, I use it to lay out stuff because
you can draw stuff to scale.  I've used it to lay out my shop, furniture
I've built, where I trenched ethernet, etc.  The fact that you can scale
the picture means you can do stuff in inches or feet or whatever you like,
scale it to fit on a page, get it the way you want and then read off the
real life dimensions.

I don't know of any other tool that lets you do drawings like that, they
are all point and click which I find far less useful.  I like pic because
you can (well I can) look at the code and see the picture.  I find that
very elegant.

At UWisc we had something called xfig that spit out pic but it was really
crappy pic, useless to edit.  Does anyone know of anything that is like
that that spits out pic that you could read?  Or a similar tool?  Or is
pic still the best?

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:04:31AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today???s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.  
> 
> Yep.  In early C++ which I found questionable but he made it work.
> 
> One of the superset things is something I got him to do in pic, the
> 'i'th construct.  This chunk of pic:
> 
> 	for i = 1 to units by 1 do {
> 		line <-> dashed from `i'th [].C.s - (.10, 0) to \
> 		    last box.nw + (i/(units+1)*w, 0)
> 	}
> 
> is part of the code that produces this:
> 
> 	http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/sunbox.pdf
> 
> and I could change "units" and have more or less machines.  That's a diagram
> of the first cluster that Sun shipped, code named sunbox, shipped as
> SparcCluster I.  My baby, never went anywhere, but my product marketing
> guy came up to me about a decade later, after Google was a thing, and
> said "I guess you were right about that clustering idea" :)
> 
> Source for the diagram is here:
> 
> 	http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/pic/sunbox.pic
> 
> Traditional troff can't handle that unless someone backported the 'i'th
> construct (which is obvious, right?).
> 
> --lm

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[arnold]

Hi.

Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> From this distant point in time it seems that it all happened in a couple
> of weeks. Joe Ossanna did most of the teaching, and no doubt supplied
> samples to copy. As far as I know the only other instructional materials
> would have been man pages and the nroff manual (forbiddingly terse,
> though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
> it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.

Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?

Agreed, -man isn't for full-fledged "regular" documents and papers, but
in terms of removing the need for low-level *roff markup, it certainly
does the job.

(Of course, that may be what you meant by saying "the first *real* macro
package ...")

Thanks!

Arnold

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem cole]

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Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On May 14, 2018, at 10:45 AM, Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff.   Which begat new roff - aka  nroff.  both assume an ASR 37 as the output device.  When the first typesetter was procured typesetter roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is a binary format).    This is also were typesetter C comes from.   Note these are 3 separate and different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input language.  These were included in V5/6/7 IIRC 
> 
> 
> 
> When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff’s author,  Brian rewrote the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff which also could support ASCII output nroff style
> 
> This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.   
> 
> Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today’s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.  
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
>>> On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>>> 
>>> Here's part of the story.
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for their C/A/T photo-typesetter?  At least, that was the lore that I heard...
>> 
>> And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
>> 
>> -- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

> Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today???s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.  

Yep.  In early C++ which I found questionable but he made it work.

One of the superset things is something I got him to do in pic, the
'i'th construct.  This chunk of pic:

	for i = 1 to units by 1 do {
		line <-> dashed from `i'th [].C.s - (.10, 0) to \
		    last box.nw + (i/(units+1)*w, 0)
	}

is part of the code that produces this:

	http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/sunbox.pdf

and I could change "units" and have more or less machines.  That's a diagram
of the first cluster that Sun shipped, code named sunbox, shipped as
SparcCluster I.  My baby, never went anywhere, but my product marketing
guy came up to me about a decade later, after Google was a thing, and
said "I guess you were right about that clustering idea" :)

Source for the diagram is here:

	http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/pic/sunbox.pic

Traditional troff can't handle that unless someone backported the 'i'th
construct (which is obvious, right?).

--lm

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem cole]

+1

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On May 14, 2018, at 10:34 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:19:50AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
>> it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.
> 
> And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the
> others, I like -ms best).

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem cole]

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Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff.   Which begat new roff - aka  nroff.  both assume an ASR 37 as the output device.  When the first typesetter was procured typesetter roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is a binary format).    This is also were typesetter C comes from.   Note these are 3 separate and different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input language.  These were included in V5/6/7 IIRC 



When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff’s author,  Brian rewrote the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff which also could support ASCII output nroff style

This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.   

Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today’s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> 
>> Here's part of the story.
> 
> [...]
> 
> You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for their C/A/T photo-typesetter?  At least, that was the lore that I heard...
> 
> And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
> 
> -- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:19:50AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
> it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.

And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the
others, I like -ms best).

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Dave,

> Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > Here's part of the story.
>
> You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for
> their C/A/T photo-typesetter?  At least, that was the lore that I
> heard...

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter) came later, and
with it the need to support more complex devices than nroff, `new roff'.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:

> Here's part of the story.

[...]

You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for 
their C/A/T photo-typesetter?  At least, that was the lore that I heard...

And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Doug McIlroy]

Here's part of the story.

> From: "Doug McIlroy" <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
> To:<tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
> Sent:Fri, 16 Dec 2016 21:09:16 -0500
> Subject:[TUHS] How Unix made it
to the top
>
> It has often been told how the Bell Labs law department became the 
> first non-research department to use Unix, displacing a newly acquired 
> stand-alone word-processing system that fell short of the department's 
> hopes because it couldn't number the lines on patent applications, 
> as USPTO required. When Joe Ossanna heard of this, he told them about 
> nroff and promised to give it line-numbering capability the next day.  
> They tried it and were hooked. Patent secretaries became remote 
> members of the fellowship of the Unix lab. In due time the law
> department got its own machine. 

Come to think of it, they must already have had a machine, probably
leased from the commercial word-processing company, for they had DEC
tapes they needed to convert to Unix format. Several of us in the Unix
lab spent a memorable afternoon decoding the proprietary format. It was
finally broken when we computed a bitwise autocorrelation function. It
had a big peak at seven. The tapes were pure ASCII rather than bytewise
ASCII--a lot of work for very little data compression.

As for training, the secretaries had to learn nroff and ed plus the
usual lot of ls, mkdir, mv, cp, rm. The patent department had to invest
in modems and order phone lines to plug them into. I don't know what
terminals they used.

From this distant point in time it seems that it all happened in a couple
of weeks. Joe Ossanna did most of the teaching, and no doubt supplied
samples to copy. As far as I know the only other instructional materials
would have been man pages and the nroff manual (forbiddingly terse,
though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.

Doug

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Nemo]

On 12/05/2018, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> > From: Nemo
>
> > I have read that one of the first groups in AT&T to use early Unix was
> > the legal dep't, specifically to use *roff to write patent applications.
> > Can anyone elaborate on this or supply references?
>
> Are you familiar with the description in Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of
> the Unix Time-sharing System":
>
>   https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.htm
>
> (in the section "The first PDP-11 system")? Not a great deal of detail,
> but...

Yes -- that was (is) the source that I read.  I was hoping for anecdotes
and the such from someone who was there.

> > It would also be interesting to learn how the writers were taught *roff,
> > what editors were used
>
> I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.

"Ed, man!"  #6-)

N.

>
>     Noel
>
>
>

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/12/2018 05:01 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> Are you familiar with the description in Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution 
> of the Unix Time-sharing System":
> 
>   https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.htm

That link seems to be missing a final "l".

Link - The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System
  - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html

Now where did I put my coffee?



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem cole]

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Right and it was ASR37 (paper) if I’m not mistaken.  Which were upper and lower case.   I also believe that is why that’s the default terminal that original roff and nroff assumes it has. 

This is before glass tty’s where popular 

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

On May 12, 2018, at 7:01 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

>> From: Nemo
> 
>> I have read that one of the first groups in AT&T to use early Unix was
>> the legal dep't, specifically to use *roff to write patent applications.
>> Can anyone elaborate on this or supply references?
> 
> Are you familiar with the description in Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of
> the Unix Time-sharing System":
> 
>  https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.htm
> 
> (in the section "The first PDP-11 system")? Not a great deal of detail, but...
> 
>> It would also be interesting to learn how the writers were taught *roff,
>> what editors were used
> 
> I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.
> 
>    Noel
> 
> 

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Nemo

    > I have read that one of the first groups in AT&T to use early Unix was
    > the legal dep't, specifically to use *roff to write patent applications.
    > Can anyone elaborate on this or supply references?

Are you familiar with the description in Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of
the Unix Time-sharing System":

  https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.htm

(in the section "The first PDP-11 system")? Not a great deal of detail, but...

    > It would also be interesting to learn how the writers were taught *roff,
    > what editors were used

I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only editor available at that point.

    Noel

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 11 May 2018, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:

> My step mother is a court reporter and she's told me many stories about 
> how she and her colleagues have created custom dictionaries, processing 
> macros (in their proprietary software), and a lot of other things that 
> most computer users simply don't do any more.

A court reporter?  I knew a bird once; she was a court reporter in a 
previous life, and had short-hand for "and he said" etc...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/11/2018 08:00 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> Of the dozen or so reporters working there, at least three or four wrote 
> their own troff macro packages, along with an assortment of awk scripts 
> to help catch errors in the transcript source documents.

I'll believe it.

My step mother is a court reporter and she's told me many stories about 
how she and her colleagues have created custom dictionaries, processing 
macros (in their proprietary software), and a lot of other things that 
most computer users simply don't do any more.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

>> 
>> And you tell that to the young people of today. and they won't believe you.
> 
> Arrgghh!  It was the four *Yorkshiremen*, of course...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

Half the Python's + Marty Feldman!

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 12 May 2018, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> <accent=Irish>
>
> And you tell that to the young people of today. and they won't believe 
> you.

Arrgghh!  It was the four *Yorkshiremen*, of course...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 11 May 2018, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:

>> We used to walk up-hill to work, both ways...
>
> And it felt *good* :-)

<accent=Irish>

And you tell that to the young people of today. and they won't believe 
you.

</accent>

-- dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> On May 11, 2018, at 7:11 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> We used to walk up-hill to work, both ways...

And it felt *good* :-)

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 11 May 2018, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:

[ ...]

> Today, when I hear people bitch about not having Word on their desktop, 
> I just laugh ;-)

We used to walk up-hill to work, both ways...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> On May 11, 2018, at 6:40 PM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It would also be interesting to learn how
> the writers were taught *roff, what editors were used, and what they
> thought.  (I recall that the secretaries, as they were then called, in
> the math dep't used vi to compose plain TeX documents and xdvi to
> proofread them.)

The original AT&T patents work would have pre-dated vi and TeX, so they would have been using ed and [nt]roff I would guess.  The BSTJ is probably a good starting point for the early history.

In the mid-late 1980s I helped deploy UNIX into a court reporting company that had been using Convergent Ngen workstations to edit and proof court transcripts.  Within a couple of months we had the court reporters trained up on vi, spell, troff, etc.  They would upload their tapes from the steno machine to the UNIX server, edit and proof the documents, then typeset the results to a Postscript printer.  Those masters would then be duplicated and sent out to the customers.

Of the dozen or so reporters working there, at least three or four wrote their own troff macro packages, along with an assortment of awk scripts to help catch errors in the transcript source documents.

Today, when I hear people bitch about not having Word on their desktop, I just laugh ;-)

--lyndon

[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Nemo]

I have read that one of the first groups in AT&T to use early Unix was
the legal dep't, specifically to use *roff to write patent
applications.  Can anyone elaborate on this or supply references?
(This would in great contrast to today, where most applications are
written with certain products despite the USPTO, EPO, and others only
accepting PDF versions.)  It would also be interesting to learn how
the writers were taught *roff, what editors were used, and what they
thought.  (I recall that the secretaries, as they were then called, in
the math dep't used vi to compose plain TeX documents and xdvi to
proofread them.)

N.