1 Jan
2022
1 Jan
'22
7:11 a.m.
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.
I similarly moved from the DEC 36-bit RUNOFF world. I was confused
why anyone would need macros, until I typed in a paper, and didn't get
any page numbers!! I'm 99.44% sure the VMS world got something called
DSR (Digital Standard Runoff) at some point (likely written in BLISS).
DEC-10/20 RUNOFF files did not always format correctly under DSR (DEC
"standards" tended to be, the VMS team implements what they want, and
they adjust the standard).
I wondered about the RUNOFF/roff connection until I learned about CTSS,
and was perplexed by IBM SCRIPT, which clearly had shared heritage,
but didn't start with the letter r, but Wikipedia just told me:
The origin of IBM's SCRIPT (markup) software began in 1968
when "IBM contracted Stuart Madnick of MIT to write a simple
document preparation ..."[8] to run on CP/67.[9] He modeled it
on MIT's CTSS RUNOFF.[10][11]
So it must be true! Look at all the footnotes!
But I was MOST perplexed when I was helping bring PDP-7 UNIX back up
(I cobbled a replacement shell together), and found PDP-7 roff was
as (or more) feeble than nroff without using a macro package
(for fun, I tried writing some man pages, tho I was pretty sure
on-line documentation didn't come about until PDP-11 days)), only
without a macro facility!