Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps

Nemu Nusquam: When was dpost born? ===== CSTR 97, A Typesetter-Independent TROFF by Brian W Kernighan was issued in 1981 and revised the next year. So that's the earliest possible date. I vaguely remember the existence of Postscript support in general, including at least one Apple Laserwriter kicking around somewhere, starting at some point during my time at 1127 in the latter 1980s. There was even a Postscript display engine that ran on 5620 terminals under mux, though it wasn't normally used for troff previewing because the troff-specific proofer was faster (mainly, I think, it didn't send nearly as much data down the serial line to the terminal). My personal snapshot of V10, and the TUHS archive copy, include dpost; see src/cmd/postscript/dpost. Everything in the postscript directory came from USG, who had packaged everything troff into a separately-licensed Documenter's Workbench package. That may have made us exclude it from the officially-distributed V8 tape and V9 snapshots. In any case, the only V9 snapshot I know of offhand (which is in Warren's archive) has no dpost. Both my copy of V10 and the TUHS copy show dpost's source files with dates in 1991, but it was certainly there earlier if I used it in New Jersey (I left in mid-1990). Dpost is documented in man8/postscript.8; my copy of that file is dated October 1989. Digging around in documents available on the web, I found a bundle of DWB 2.0 docs: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/Documentors_Workbench_1989/UNIX_Syste… It's a scanned-image PDF so I can't search it by machine, but it includes such things as listings of the source-code directory and manifests of various binary distributions, and dpost doesn't appear anywhere I can see. As the URL implies, the docs seem to be dated 1989. So maybe dpost wasn't part of the product until DWB 3.0; but maybe we in Research got an early copy of the postscript stuff (I think bwk was in regular communication with the USG-troff folks), perhaps in 1989. I confess I've lost track of the original question that spawned this thread, but if it is whether dpost is easily back-ported to PDP-11 UNIX, I don't think that's likely without a good bit of work. It would very likely require a post-1980-type C compiler, since it was written in the late 1980s. It might or might not fit on a PDP-11; I don't remember whether USG's system still officially ran there by the late 1980s. Norman Wilson Toronto ON