[TUHS] Re: UNIX Roff Manual

[Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>]

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I had meant to copy TUSH on this/

On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 2:41 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com> wrote:

> I got excited by your mention of a S/360 version, but Doug's link talks
> about the GECOS version (GE/Honeywell hardware).
>
> Princeton had a S/360 version at about that time, it was a re-write of a
> version for the IBM 7094 done by Kernighan after spending a summer at MIT
> with CTSS and RUNOFF.  I'm very curious whether the Princeton S/360 version
> spread to other locations.  Found this article in the Daily Princetonian
> about the joy and history of ROFF.
> https://photos.app.goo.gl/zMWV1GRLZdNBUuP36
>
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 1:51 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> Just sharing a copy of the Roff Manual that I had forgotten I scanned a
>> little while back:
>>
>> https://archive.org/details/roff_manual
>>
>> This appears to be the UNIX complement to the S/360 version of the paper
>> backed up by Doug here:
>> https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/roff71/roff71.pdf
>>
>> From the best I could tell, this predates both 1973's V3 and the 1971
>> S/360 version of the paper, putting it somewhere prior to 1971.  For
>> instance, it is missing the .ar, .hx, .ig, .ix, .ni, .nx, .ro, .ta, and .tc
>> requests found in V3.  The .ar and .ro, and .ta requests pop up in the
>> S/360 paper, the rest are in the V3 manpage (prior manpages don't list the
>> request summary).
>>
>> If anyone has some authoritative date information I can update the
>> archive description accordingly.
>>
>> Finally, this very well could be missing the last page, the Page offset,
>> Merge patterns, and Envoi sections of Doug's paper are not reflected here,
>> although at the very least, the .mg request is not in this paper so the
>> Merge patterns section probably wasn't there anyway.
>>
>> - Matt G.
>>
>

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