Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976))

ᐧ On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 3:49 PM Greg A. Woods <woods(a)robohack.ca> wrote: Hard to call it a myth - it was quite available. In fact, I never used a single mainstream UNIX system from DEC, IBM, HP later Sun, Masscomp, Apollo that did not have it, and many if not all small systems did also. Yes, but after Tom Ferrin created vcat(1) in the late 1970s ('77 I think, but I've forgotten). Many people did have access to a plotter which cost about $1k in the late 1970s, or even later a 'wet' laser printer like the Imagen which cost about $5K a few years later. (and hardly anyone cared to use nroff to format things for line printers). No offense, but that's just not true. Line printers and nroff were used a great deal to prep things, and often UNIX folks had access to a daisy shell printer for higher quality nroff output, much less using the line printer. > People would install Wordstar long before they even thought about using > nroff. I did not know anyone that did that. But I'll take your word for it. Wordstar as I recall ran on 8-bit PCs. The only two people I knew that had larger CP/M systems back in the day that might have supported that were Phil Karn (*a.k.a.* KA9Q of TCP/IP for CP/M fame) and Guy Soytomayer - both were sometimes lab partners. But all three of us had access to the XGP in CMU CS dept, using Scribe on the PDP-10s, but we all used nroff most of the time because we had more cycles available on the UNIX boxes and the 10s required going to the terminal room. FWIW: my non-techie CMU course professors used to let you turning papers printed off the line printer and people used anything they had - which was Scribe on the 20s and nroff on the Unix, boxes and I've forgotten the name of the program that ran on the TSS, which the business majors like my roommate tended to use. > Ditroff (or sqtroff) was also incredibly rare to non-existent for 99% of > the Unix sites I worked at and visited; even some time after it became > available. Even sites running native AT&T Unix, e.g. on 3B2s, and thus > could easily obtain it, often didn't want the added expense of > installing it. The only time I had a deal with pure AT&T systems was occasionally at the AT&T, but even there most of them that I worked, had BSD or Research, based systems. The only 3B2 I ever saw was the one we were forced to buy by AT&T to get a System V source license at Stellar as the reference system, when PDP-11 and Vaxen stopped being the default. We did get ditroff from the toolchest for it, since we were including it in the base Stellar system. The Apple Laserwriter was fully in the wild with transcript by then, so vcat was not needed. > So, old troff was basically a total useless waste of disk space until > psroff came along. Sounds like you never had access to a plotter. > Psroff made troff useful, psroff was very, very late in the UNIX development. vcat was nearly 10 years earlier, and psroff only showed up after the Apple Laserwriter which is what - early 1985 I think. But Versatec and the like plotter were all over the place, much less daisy wheel printers. True, the Hersey fonts were not nearly as nice as PostScript and the resolution was only 200 dpi (and it was a wet process) but most UNIX sites, particularly if you had invested in Vaxen had them. Excuse me... most end-users sites had them. Sun was the only one of the majors that did not ship a C compiler with the system by default. And as Larry has pointed out, even that was fixed by rms fairly soon afterward. But all of the suppliers of the majors UNIX implementations knew that you got the C compiler with UNIX. Jacks to open -- just include it. It sounds like your early UNIX experiences were in a limited version, which is a little sad and I can see that might color your thinking. > A C compiler was often the biggest impediment to many sites I worked at > -- > they didn't have programmers and they didn't want to shell out even cash > more for any programming tools (even though they had often hired me as a > consulting programmer to "fix their Unix system"!). Yeech... sorry to hear that. Hmmm ... you were complaining you need a C compiler for ditroff, yet groff needs C++ IIRC.? > to install TeX, even if it meant hiring a consultant to do it, since that Which means you need a Pascal compiler BTW .... and Tex was written using the PDP-10 Pascal extensions, so you had to have a Pascal that understood that. Which was often not easy, particularly on UNIX boxes. The UCB Pascal != PDP-10 Pascal. > meant having far wider printer support (though realistically PostScript > printers were the only viable solution at some point, e.g. especially > after laser printers became available, i.e. outside Xerox and IBM shops). My guess this observation is because HP was late to the Postscript world and there while the eventual hpcat(1) was done for the vaxen and made it the USENET, it was fairly late in time, and I'm not sure if anyone at HP or anyone else ever wrote a ditroff backend for HP's PCL. The key is that Apple Laserwriters were pretty cheap and since they already did PS, most sites I knew just bought PS based ones and did not go HP until later when PS was built-in. > I was quite a fan of, and an extreme expert in using, troff and tbl. Good to hear. > However once I discovered Lout I dropped troff like a hot potato. Never used it, but I'll take your word for it. I believe it is very Scribe like and looking at it you can see in the influence. ᐧ