Re: [TUHS] My EuroBSDcon talk (preview for commentary)

Awesome -- great way to figure it out, although I'm not sure 3rd edition was nroff, I think it might have been roff. I think a smart test is to check to see if those sources used a macro package or not. If not macro package, I think that tells us that the likely formatting program was roff. It does leave us an interesting question, when did the original roff(1) show up and when did nroff(1). The original, roff(1), was early, and of course not until after the original PDP-11/20 port. But was it as early as first edition? roff was the first formatting program. nroff replaced it later on, although roff lived through the 6th edition (I do not believe it is on the v7 tape). I was under the impression that the order is this ... roff was written for either v1 or v2 in 1970 or 71; I thought originally by Ken to be similar to the runoff that ran on the GE systems. At some point the team recieved the /C/A/T and Joseph Ossanna wrote a new program to support it, *a.k.a. *troff, that was similar to roff but troff was not a superset of the original program. nroff was then written after troff came into being to parrot the behavior of troff using an ASR-37; but I do not know who was the author (it might have been Ossanna). But it was a third program, that used the same macro packages as troff that started to appear for Ossanna's program and the input language was changed so that a document author could know what was the output target. As I said, nroff and roff were in the v6 distribution, although not troff if I remember it correctly; although troff was part of PWB 1.0. The inclusion of both roff and nroff was because some of the Unix papers/documentation used roff for formatting, not the troff/nroff input syntax. That said, the PWB man pages have the roff manpage, as well as a single man page for both nroff and troff with sections later that say 'nroff only' and 'troff only.' Also I do not remember having any macro packages for roff(1), but their might have been some, although I just checked the PWB man page and it does not list a .so command to read in macros, there is no mention of a macro switch on the command line and in the files section the only external file it used was the hyphenation tables. Finally, Ossanna tragically died and some time later the new APS/5 was obtained. So, bwk wrote a new program yet, that used post processors and some front end tables, to allow the 'typesetter' portion to work regardless of the output device (*i.e.* device independent troff or ditroff). With the idea only a single program would be needed to be supported. By this point nothing in the Research 'releases' required the original roff program and since it was in assembler, I believe that it was dropped from all further support. Clem On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 4:53 PM Diomidis Spinellis <dds(a)aueb.gr> wrote: