7 Jan
2024
7 Jan
'24
8:17 a.m.
Hi Clem,
Hmmm.. I was thinking of keeping out of this food
fight, but a couple of
comments concern me a little as they seem to differ from the history as I
recall it.
Thank you for various juicy details - but I still have a hard time
accepting your timeline. BWK's paper "A Typesetter-independent TROFF"
(troff source here, file date 30-Mar-1983:
http://medialab.freaknet.org/martin/tape/stuff/ditroff/docs/indep_troff )
contains these passages:
| Early in 1979,
| the Computing Science Research Center
| decided to acquire a new typesetter,
| primarily because of our interests in typesetting graphics.
| At the same time,
| the Murray Hill Computer Center
| began to investigate the possibility of replacing their
| family of aging CAT's
| with a new, high-performance typesetter,
then
| Accordingly, in the spring of 1979,
| I set about to modify
| .UC TROFF
| so that it would run hence\%forth without change
| on a variety of typesetters.
then
| This version of
| .UC TROFF
| has been in use
| since September of 1979.
| Most of our experience with it has been on the
| 202 and Tektronix scopes, but the CAT and APS-5 drivers have been
| exercised to some degree.
The "summer vacation" paper gives a similar timeline: 202 acquired in
summer of '79, troff preparatory work done "ahead of time" (consistent
with "spring of 1979" in indep_troff paper), production use by Sept of
1979 just like indep_troff says. I admit that I was wrong in my first
recollection of 1980 or 81 - but I still have a hard time believing
that there was a _working_ ditroff setup in '78. Ideas and thoughts
about moving away from CAT-specific troff - sure - but a working setup
is a different story.
But of course I wasn't there, and you say you were... If ditroff
really did exist in 1978-August when BWK wrote the "Troff tutorial"
paper (the one that appears right away Ossanna's original manual in V7,
4.2BSD and 4.3BSD docs), why does that paper not contain a single word
about it, talking only about the Graphic Systems typesetter? Was the
existence of ditroff a closely guarded secret then?
Back to my original assertion about \(sq character in Bold having
changed from hollow to filled square while still on CAT-4. Let's say
I am wrong here and you are right that it became a filled square only
in some non-CAT ditroff setup. But if ditroff was secret, non-releasable
stuff in 1978 leading up to V7, why did they define "blot" as \fB\(sq\fP
in /usr/pub/eqnchar? The distributed system (as of V7) contained only
CAT-driving troff and no ditroff - so surely eqnchar was produced to
be usable by users of the as-is distributed system...
My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me otherwise, I
shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7
Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving
troff, and that the filled \(sq in Bold in V7 manuals (in this trofftut
document and eqnchar(7) man page in Vol1) indicates that this filled
square was present in Bold on CAT-4. Yet this square being hollow in
all 3 font samples in Ossanna's original 1976 manual in the very same
V7 Vol2 indicates that the font was different back in '76. The only
explanation that fits is that some time between 1976-10 and 1978-08
the Bold film strip on the CAT was changed to an updated version from
GSI.
This is true - although I believe that the processor
was from Autologic,
the typesetter was from Alphanumeric Corp.
So why are all papers from those days (ditroff docs, Usenix print notes
for 4.3BSD) referring to it as Autologic APS-5?
the 1978 version of the K&R (which I thought was
set on the APS-5 for the
first version - although it may have been on the Meganthaler). While I
still have a first edition, at one time, I had a copy of the proofs, which
I got from tjk in late 1977 IIRC - it might have been the Fall of '78
Now this part is intriguing. Wikipedia says the 1st ed of K&R C book
was published February 22, 1978. Are you *absolutely certain* it was
troffed on APS-5 or Linotron 202 etc? (I never got a copy, so I don't
have a colophon to look at.) If this book, published in early 1978,
was indeed produced on a setup that was only possible with ditroff,
then why did BWK tell the story of *beginning* ditroff coding work
(actual implementation, not just thoughts/ideas) in spring of '79 in
preparation for 202 arriving that summer?
Another inexplicable mystery with this hypothesis: if ditroff was in
some working state (good enough to publish a book) in 1978-Feb, why in
the world was it excluded from V7 release - and not only excluded as
in shipping code, but total suppression of any mention of its existence?
- Alphanumeric Corp released the Alphanumeric
Photocomposition System
(APS) #5 in 1976 using an Autologic-73 mini to drive it.
Thank you for decoding what APS stood for! Although in my mind it will
probably always be "avtomaticheskiy pistolet Stechkina" in my native
Russian. :-)
M~