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

We used nroff quite a bit with both the Model37 teletype (for which it wsa designed, ours even had the greek box on it) and with output filters for the lineprinter and the Diablos. Later on we drove troff into cat emulators that used Versatec printers. I don’t knwo wher Berkely’s vcat got their fonts, but the JHU verset had an amusing history on that. George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out the fonts in large point size on film. In the basement of the biophysics bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope which used a PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so) framebuffer. George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad hooked them up to the X and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope. Then he put a photomutlipler tube in a scope camera housing and hoked the sense wire from the microscope to that. He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner. He’d tape one letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope sofware (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope. Then without powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he’d boot up miniunix and copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack. After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT emulator. I had gone to work for Martin Marietta wirking on a classified project so I wrote hacks to the -mm macro package to handle security markings (automatically putting the highest on each page on thte top and bottom). Later when ditroff became available I continued to use it with various laserprinters. I even wrote macropackages to emulate IBM’s doc style when we were contracting with them. This was all to the chagrin of my boss who wanted us to switch to Framemaker. --