12 Jan
2022
12 Jan
'22
2:54 p.m.
Clem,
Once again, you have the timeline wrong on all this. The ditroff work
was started in the summer of 1979, well after V6, Typesetter C and
V7. Details are available at https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/202paper.pdf
and https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pdf.
Perhaps Doug can set the history straight on troff. Here is my understanding,
corrections (from Doug) welcome:
- Ossanna wrote the original nroff in assembly language
- He rewrote it in C when the C/A/T was acquired
At that time nroff/troff were built from mostly the same sources (as
can be seen in the archives).
Thanks,
Arnold
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
After Joe died and the BTL crew got a new APS5
typesetter, Brian set out to
rewrite the code base to support any typesetting by using traditional
compiler technology of converting the input to an ASCII representation that
is walked by a seperate program that generates the device specific output.
In fact it was this work (original done on V6) that forced Dennis (and I
assume Steve Johnson) to update the C language a bit - which is what is
described in K&R1. Brian's code and a version of DMR's updated C compiler
was released independently as a package - hence the term 'typesetter C.'
This compiler and the new document system took a seperate license. I had
it at both CMU in the 70s and Tektronix -- I think Steve Glaser had it at
Rice also - again ask someone else for other sites, including some of the
early European ones.
Later Brian's work was updated after V7 and included some new tools, and
became known as Writer's Workbench, which eventually was entered in the
'toolchest.'
At the time of the first release Brian published a paper / TR that
describes the new version of troff (a.ka. ditroff), including some level of
documentation for the intermediate language. That was published and would
have been officially available to James.