25 Aug
2017
25 Aug
'17
10:27 p.m.
On Aug 25, 2017, at 2:27 PM, Chris Torek <torek(a)torek.net> wrote:
Last fall, I wrote an article for the American Printing History Association called
'The Electric Typesetter: The Origins of Computing in Typography.’ In doing research,
I found the earliest succession of roff predecessors went something like this:
TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff
TJ-2 is described at <http://www.dpbsmith.com/tj2.html>. I don’t have info on the
other processors at hand at the moment.
Folks here might be interested in my article, but sadly the journal doesn’t tend to put
their content online for quite a while. The TOC for the issue is at
<https://printinghistory.org/publications/printing-history/ns/#21>.
—John
As a *roff
fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
The *original* original (Unix) roff (not sure if there was
a precursor elsewhere) was in pdp-11 assembly.