Re: [TUHS] roff(7)

In 79-82 Runoff got me my undergraduate texts formatted on a dec10. Moving to work post degree on Unix and vms systems (my memory is that for some reason VMS didn't have runoff) I had the Normalised "oh this must be the same" hitting roff/nroff and got really confused by having both ms and me macros. Nobody seemed to be able to explain to me why you wanted both (the mysteries and distinctions of v<X> vs BSD were completely lost to me at this early stage). But macros aside, anyone who had used runoff had a massively simpler path into roff than TeX. My future was set. The phd students at Leeds looked down their noses at me for using cryptic .2 letter inline magic. They were the high priests of things, I was just a computer operator. Watching them spend weeks and weeks wrangling a one em offset problem stopping perfection in print was.. entertaining. Then we somehow got ditroff at Leeds uni. That was really weird, because it was obviously "better" but again nobody could explain why the di- bit magically appeared. (We had a Benson- Varian slimey paper printer at some fantastical dpi like 120 or 150 which turned up at the same time.) wasn't this just Troff? Oh God, was it really called t/roff not troff... The entire production path to lpr had some driver logic to put "--" cut marks on the continuous paper so you knew where to guillotine from the roll, but unfortunately was wired to US legal paper sizes not A4 (presumably some macro definitions file would have fixed this) I still have a poem from the British computer society about the birth of the icl 2900 typeset in olde English, centred. That Benson-Varian must have used damn good printing because it's still readable 40 years later when parking tickets (similar print process?) Fade out in a day. It was also around the time that "tbl" had what we all thought was a bug, drawing the horizontal boxlines off by one. Nobody at the time understood this was to counteract a specific electromechanical printer issue inside AT&T. Since it was coming in BSD Unix I can imagine back inside Berkeley people binning our complaints. If you don't remember which 1200bpi tape the software came from, don't just complain at random... The "pic" tool had also just hit, and it obviously didn't share those line offset problems which made us all very suspicious: "ITS THE SAME PEOPLES CODE" we shouted at each other (it wasnt) ... G