13 Jul
2025
13 Jul
'25
4:55 a.m.
On Sat, Jul 12, 2025 at 10:01:47PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
James Clark referred to it as BSD ditroff and goes on to
comment on how groff didn't use some of the BSD extensions in
a Sep 30, 1991 post to comp.text:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.text/c/OBd9K9hEPSE/m/adTHd_3O434J
A Dec 12, 1984 post to net.text called it ditroff gremlin:
https://groups.google.com/g/net.text/c/nVeNpNAHxP0/m/Ea2bLUJEnjkJ
John Ousterhout, the UCB contact mentioned, led the research group
that did Sprite. grn(1) was also included in Sprite.
Hi Jonathan,
At 2025-07-13T12:45:30+1000, Jonathan Gray wrote:
...which one? Is the one you're referencing archived at minnie?
Or do you mean the man page listed below as "grn.1"?
CD4 local/man/man1/grn.1
seems to be the same text as
http://man.bsd.lv/4.4BSD-Lite2/grn.1
(it is not part of 4.4BSD-Lite2)
I'm
not sure about that reference to "Berkeley troff". I already
deleted the modifier "device-independent" from that sentence because
I've never seen even a whisper of evidence that the CSRG ever
distributed Kernighan's device-independent troff; that was locked up
behind AT&T's revenue-seeking aims.
from the Berkeley manual: grn - ditroff preprocessor for gremlin files
more on the Berkeley ditroff distribution below
Indeed! I knew about vtroff but not about a Berkeley fork of Kernighan
troff. This is significant news to me, and adds a whole new branch onto
the troff family tree in my head.