14 Sep
2019
14 Sep
'19
4:55 a.m.
Thanks. So we have a date that explains the pdp-11 assembler version - it
was there at v1.
On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 6:14 PM Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 05:45:51PM -0400, Clem Cole
wrote:
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
It does leave us an interesting question, when
did the original
roff(1)
show up and when did nroff(1). The original,
roff(1), was early, and
of course not until after the original PDP-11/20 port. But was it as
early as first edition? roff was the first formatting program.
nroff
replaced it later on, although roff lived
through the 6th edition (I
do
not believe it is on the v7 tape).
There was a roff on PDP-7 Unix:
By the spring of 1971, it was generally agreed that no one had the
slightest interest in scrapping Unix. Therefore, we transliterated
the roff text formatter into PDP-11 assembler language, starting from
the PDP-7 version that had been transliterated from McIlroy’s BCPL
version on Multics, which had in turn been inspired by J. Saltzer’s
runoff program on CTSS.
From "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System"
http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchie84evolution.pdf
Cheers, Warren