13 Jan
2022
13 Jan
'22
10:02 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 8:36 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scribe specifically;
I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing books. I wonder what
the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all.
You can best view them as -ms vs -me. Two different sets of macros to
markup the text with semantic information that's then turned into useful
rendering by a variety of ways. texinfo and latex are completely unrelated
at a code level. LaTeX predates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it
up, but I encountered LaTeX years before texinfo, though it's possible I
just ignored it when working on bringing up GNU Emacs on VMS 5.mumble back
in the day). It was always my impression that texinfo came more from the
ITS info file world and that the TeX bits were initially just a hack
because it was also on those machines... It would be interesting to hear
from people that were there.
On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese
<treese(a)acm.org> wrote:
I understand that Stallman was deeply affected by both the closed nature
of and "time bombs" in Scribe.
[snip]
The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for
some time from a company called Unilogic, later
Scribe Systems,
There is a long (and somewhat nasty history history here). Mike Shamus
was a one-time CMU CS prof. He created Unilogic and arranged for the IP
to be transferred to him. They had a transpiler that converted
'compatible BLISS' (*a.k.a*. Vax Bliss) to other languages. I believe
that a flavor of Pascal, Ada and C were possible outputs. I'm not sure of
the provenance of the transpiler. Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC
project - Product Quality Compiler Compiler, that Wulf and his students
were working. That work forked Tartan labs around the same time as
Unilogic and I know transpilers had been part of the original work, but I
never closed the loop. To be honest they had to have been related in
some manner, but that all happened after I had left.
At that point, Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version
to compatible BLISS on VAX/VMS. Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for
TOPS, Vax both VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other
systems (maybe HP and AIX). The sad part is that history seems to have
lost both Scribe and the associated transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise,
I'd love to hear something).
[snip]
To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that
with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not
seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller). IIRC Ken's
program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also. But FrameMaker (like
Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear
addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC. I never really
learned it although Ken gave me a copy early on to play with. IIRC our
doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time
were strictly roff as previously discussed).
Does anyone have any experience with Interleaf? That was another in the
lineage of document processors that seems to have fallen into history.
But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My
understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way
to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic
LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe.
Indeed - that is what I have been told. I am under the impression that
early on when Brian started as a Stanford Prof, he had difficulty getting a
use license from Unilogic even though he was the original author.
That churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of
LaTex to make Tex more accessible.
To bring it back to Unix, troff et al are obvious
examples of the Unix
philosophy applied to document preparation, while TeX and its progeny have
always felt very foreign to me. They work, of course, but in a way that
feels discordant with respect to the aesthetic of the system. Of course,
TeX originated on the SAIL system, so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world
had different sensibilities than the Unix world. One wonders whether, if
Knuth had been working on a Unix machine instead of SAIL, whether TeX would
have been as chatty as it is; I suspect not.
Likely not. It was only slightly odd to me because our school moved from
TOPS-20 to SunOS and 4.{2,3}BSD (maybe others, don't know when the VAX was
delivered: it was just there when I arrived with a boatload of HP terminals
attached to it which I thought odd). It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what
it does. That seemed perfectly natural to me when I started using it.
Warner