[TUHS] Re: Old troff files (1988-2007)

I got a chuckle because apparently an old quote of mine is enshrined in the GROFF documentation (under the debugging section): Standard troff voodoo, just put a power of two backslashes in front of it until it works and if you still have problems add a \c. — Ron Natalie Thanks, G. Branden Robinson, for calling it to my attention. More nroff fun and games: My first job out of college was working on a restricted government project on RSX-11/M. I’d been doing various UNIX and n/troff stuff for years at JHU. The QA people decided to go all PWB on this project using SCCS etc… I knew that Denis Mumaugh at the NSA had written nroff macros to do classification markings automatically. I asked for a copy, but he couldn’t figure out how to get a tape to me. I reimplemented it myself. Originally, I had the idea of processing each marked paragraph into a diversion but that was problematic. I then just output the footer and then “reverse fed” the paper back to the top to add the top classification. Of course, you had to run your nroff via col to get it to print right. I also fixed the line printer spooler to catch classification markings and mark them pages appropriately as well. All this I did while waiting the 11 months for my ‘beyond TS’ clearance to arrive. Seems like everybody on the project failed their polygraph the first time. Examiner must have had a hard seat on the bus from the east coast. This was also the project where I had this exchange: Bernie: What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor? Me: It’s UNIX. It’s all Bell System crud. I walk around to his terminal and see this: $ 1 One Bell System. It works. $ 1 One Bell System. It works. Me: You’re not in the editor, Bernie. After that the /usr/bin/1 command was changed to echo “You’re not in the editor, Bernie.”