18 Jul
2024
18 Jul
'24
4:45 a.m.
I had meant to copy TUSH on this/
On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 2:41 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)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(a)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.