On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 11:37 AM Larry McVoy <
lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
So Clem, the fact that troff lost and LaTex won is a direct result of
that walled garden that was the early days of Unix.
Unless you had a Unix license, no troff for you!
yes ... but ... even UNIX binary folks had troff licenses and many/most at ditroff licenses. I know Masscomp just ate $5 per CPU and included it because we did not want to mess with the older version. If you were an academic, it was free so most research academics had either the source or at least a binary on their workstations.
This did not become an issue until the 386, but by that time Clark had written what would be groff.
I think your observation is correct, but in practice, I don't think that was what it was.
I think the academics went LaTex and that had more to do with it. LaTex was closer to Scribe for the PDP-10s and Vaxen, which had a short head lead on all them until it went walled garden when CMU sold the rights (and even its author - Brian Ried) could not use it at a Stanford.
So your are right, Wall Garden certainly impacted the result, but I think it was more preference in this case.
Which is a huge bummer, I'm a huge
troff fan (especially pic, but all of the preprocessors let you see the
output in your head).
I wish we lived in a troff world but we don't
and that is a direct result of haves (license holders) and have nots
(the other 99.999999% of the world).
Maybe -- I think the PC and Word was the real kiss of death, which I find even more troubling.
It's not the result we would like but it is what it is.
+1