[TUHS] Re: Old troff files (1988-2007)

["Ron Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com>]

I got a chuckle because apparently an old quote of mine is enshrined in 
the GROFF documentation (under the debugging section):

Standard troff voodoo, just put a power of two backslashes in front of 
it until it works and if you still have problems add a \c. — Ron Natalie

Thanks, G. Branden Robinson, for calling it to my attention.

More nroff fun and games:   My first job out of college was working on a 
restricted government project on RSX-11/M.    I’d been doing various 
UNIX and n/troff stuff for years at JHU.
The QA people decided to go all PWB on this project using SCCS etc…     
I knew that Denis Mumaugh at the NSA had written nroff macros to do 
classification markings automatically.
I asked for a copy, but he couldn’t figure out how to get a tape to me.  
  I reimplemented it myself.   Originally, I had the idea of processing 
each marked paragraph into a diversion but
that was problematic.   I then just output the footer and then “reverse 
fed” the paper back to the top to add the top classification.   Of 
course, you had to run your nroff via col to
get it to print right.

I also fixed the line printer spooler to catch classification markings 
and mark them  pages appropriately as well.    All this I did while 
waiting the 11 months for my ‘beyond TS’ clearance to arrive.
Seems like everybody on the project failed their polygraph the first 
time.  Examiner must have had a hard seat on the bus from the east 
coast.

This was also the project where I had this exchange:

Bernie:   What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor?
Me:   It’s UNIX.   It’s all Bell System crud.

I walk around to his terminal and see this:

$ 1
One Bell System.  It works.
$ 1
One Bell System.   It works.

Me:    You’re not in the editor,  Bernie.

After that the /usr/bin/1 command was changed to

echo “You’re not in the editor, Bernie.”