11 Dec
2013
11 Dec
'13
8:12 p.m.
Steve - great story. Clem
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 5:11 PM, <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
One of the most amusing and unexpected consequences of
phototypesetting
was the Unix standard error file (!). After phototypesetting, you had to
take a long wide strip of paper and feed it carefully into a smelly, icky
machine which eventually (several minutes later) spat out the paper with
the printing visible.
One afternoon several of us had the same experience -- typesetting
something, feeding the paper through the developer, only to find a single,
beautifully typeset line: "cannot open file foobar" The grumbles were
loud enough and in the presence of the right people, and a couple of days
later the standard error file was born...
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 09:45:22AM -0500, Doug
McIlroy wrote:
I'm extremely jealous of you. I'm a long time troff fan and would have
loved to have been there during that time. I'm sure it was far less
pleasant than my rose colored glasses have it, but it sure seems like
it was fun. I'd like to have met Joe Ossanna - care to share any stories
about what sort of person, programmer, etc he was?
That's perhaps a whole different thread, I'd love to shove a beer into
each and every bell labs guy hanging around here and get them talking.
Bell Labs was a huge influence on me, be good to have
Bell-labs-stories.com
or something filled with your memories.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com
http://www.bitkeeper.com
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The wikipedia description
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter)>
seems pretty accurate although I have never seen the beast myself.
I can confirm the wikipedia description. At Bell Labs, however, we
did not use paper tape input. As soon as the machine arrived, Joe
Ossanna bypassed the tape reader so the C/A/T could be driven
directly from the PDP-11. The manufacturer was astonished.
The only operational difficulty we had was with the separate
developer. If you didn't hand feed the end of the paper perfectly
straight into that machine, the paper would tear. Joe Condon
fixed that by arranging for the canister to sit on rollers so
it could give when the paper pulled sideways.
The first technical paper that came off the C/A/T drew a query
from the journal editor, who'd never seen a phototypeset
manuscript before: had it been published elsewhere?
Doug