14 May
2018
14 May
'18
8:45 p.m.
Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff. Which begat new roff - aka nroff. both
assume an ASR 37 as the output device. When the first typesetter was procured typesetter
roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is a binary
format). This is also were typesetter C comes from. Note these are 3 separate and
different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input language. These
were included in V5/6/7 IIRC
When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff’s author, Brian rewrote
the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff which also
could support ASCII output nroff style
This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.
Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today’s groff which takes mostly a
superset of the ditroff input language.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Here's part of the story.
[...]
You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for
their C/A/T photo-typesetter? At least, that was the lore that I heard...
And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
-- Dave