14 Jan
2022
14 Jan
'22
6:10 a.m.
Dennis spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the troff code in the late
1980s, if I remember right, moving it to modern C. He got annoyed by it one
day. It was the "ditroff" variant although honestly I don't remember us
ever calling it that. It was just the current version of troff. Not sure
where the name came from. Perhaps it was us but I think of it as a foreign
name.
-rob
On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 11:05 AM Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
Most of y'all are aware of Brian Kernighan's
troff involvement. My
understanding is that he pretty much took over nroff/troff after Joe Ossana
died, and came out with ditroff.
But Brian had much earlier involvement with non-UNIX *roff. When he was
pursuing his PhD at Princeton, he spent a summer at MIT using CTSS and
RUNOFF. When he came back to P'ton, he wrote a ROFF for the IBM 7094,
later translated to the IBM 360. Many generations of students, myself
included, use the IBM ROFF (batch, not interactive) as a much friendlier
alternative to dumb typewriters. I don't know if 360 ROFF spread beyond
Princeton, but I wouldn't be surprised.
BTW, during my summer at Bell, nroff/troff was one of the few programs I
could not port to the Interdata 8/32 - it was just a mess of essentially
typeless code. I don't think Joe Ossana got around to it either before he
died.
--
- Tom