7 Oct
2017
7 Oct
'17
4:40 a.m.
Mike Lesk told me, (so this is now officially apocryphal because its
friend-of-a-friend) that TBL had stuff in there, to specifically
address a faulty throw-back action in the linotronic output device,
and thats why troff/tbl output on more modern things like the wet
process benson varian printer we had, drew some of the lines out of
whack: it was adjusting for another typesetters mechanical positioning
faults.
I'd love to know if this is true. I did look under the hood at T/Roff
and it was indescribably weirder than I imagined. I thought the macros
were weird, then I discovered what the expanded to.
On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:33 PM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
"Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but
is utterly frozen " appeared in the V6 man pages.
This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being
"utterly frozen."
The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special
command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the
user's home dir.
Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is
utterly frozen."
For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael
John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm
(his initials).
This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its
programmers.
Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware
"Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with
the idea.
I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator. I got
an immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud.