25 Nov
2015
25 Nov
'15
4:44 p.m.
I was a little tongue in cheek, but it worked, I was trying to tease
out more details about the beginning.
And I personally love troff, had to write a paper in Latex recently
and found it painful.
On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:08:17AM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
It's worth noting that Unix was built for
troff. Typesetting patents
if I recall correctly.
This is a stretch. Unix was really built because Ken and Dennis
had a good idea. The purchase of a PDP-11 for it was in part
justified by the goal of making a word-processing system. The
first in-house "sale" of Unix was indeed to the patent department
for typing patents--the selling point was that roff could be
made (by an overnight modification) to print line numbers as
USPTO required, whereas that was not a feature of a commercial
competitor. The timeline is really roff--Unix--patent--nroff--troff.
Though roff antedated Unix, it did not motivate Unix.
Is this The UNIX Time-Sharing System, or related
to it? The same
claim appears in the first paragraph:
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html
This draft clearly dates from 1971. Pieces of it were worked
into subsequent versions of the manual as well as published
descriptions of Unix, including the SIGOPS/CACM paper.
Doug
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