Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976))

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

We used nroff quite a bit with both the Model37 teletype (for which it 
wsa designed, ours even had the greek box on it) and with output filters 
for the lineprinter and the Diablos.

Later on we drove troff into cat emulators that used Versatec printers.  
    I don’t knwo wher Berkely’s vcat got their fonts, but the JHU verset 
had an amusing history on that.

George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out 
the fonts in large point size on film.    In the basement of the 
biophysics bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope which 
used a PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so) 
framebuffer.    George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad 
hooked them up to the X and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope.    Then he 
put a photomutlipler tube in a scope camera housing and hoked the sense 
wire from the microscope to that.

He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner.   He’d tape 
one letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope 
sofware (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope.    Then 
without powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he’d boot up 
miniunix and copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack.
After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT 
emulator.

I had gone to work for Martin Marietta wirking on a classified project 
so I wrote hacks to the -mm macro package to handle security markings 
(automatically putting the highest on each page on thte top and bottom). 
    Later when ditroff became available I continued to use it with 
various laserprinters.    I even wrote macropackages to emulate IBM’s 
doc style when we were contracting with them.

This was all to the chagrin of my boss who wanted us to switch to 
Framemaker.