16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
1:31 a.m.
Clem Cole writes:
Excellent - thanks for the pointer. This shows nroff
before troff.
FWIW: I guess I was miss informed, but I had been under the impression
that was the other way around. i.e. nroff was done to be compliant with
the new troff, replacing roff, although the suggestion here is that he
wrote it add macros to roff. I'll note that either way, the dates are all
possible of course because the U/L case ASR 37 was introduced 1968 so by
the early 1970's they would have been around the labs.
Yes, we had ASR 37s, used one myself. Not only did the do upper and lower
case, but they also did Greek and math characters, had bracket building
characters, and so on. Biggest problem was line noise since these were
mostly on dial-up. One could be having a nice day and all of a sudden a
burst of line noise would trigger a shift-out and everything would be
gibberish.