14 Sep
2019
14 Sep
'19
8:02 a.m.
> slightest interest in scrapping Unix.
Therefore, we transliterated
> the roff text formatter into PDP-11 assembler language, starting from
> the PDP-7 version that had been transliterated from McIlroy???s BCPL
> version on Multics, which had in turn been inspired by J. Saltzer???s
> runoff program on CTSS.
As a *roff guy to the core, to this day, I'd love to see any docs on the
Multics version and/or the CTSS version.
Roff has some pretty sophisticated stuff (environments come to mind) that
I think 99.9% of the CS world doesn't understand (sort of like my rant
on SCCS, most people didn't look hard enough to get it. I'm not sure
that I get roff environments to this day but I kinda do).
I'd love to see the docs on that early stuff and see if Joe Ossanna
added in his own magic or was he carrying forward earlier magic.
--lm
P.S. I love this list for this stuff, I'm an old retired guy that
wishes he could have helped birth Unix. Hanging out with the people
who were there is super fun.