Wow. That article gives me some interesting insight. I knew and used something at CMU called roff on TSS but I never knew where it came from. It was the first in any of those families of programs I learned to use. I had thought it was just part of our TSS system. But your article says the Princeton version was written by my old friend Paul Hillfinger. Paul was a CMU grad student. While most of the CS folks used the PDP-10s, Paul was one of few that knew his way around the IBM gear - which in fact was how I had met him. I would help him with systems issues since I was one of the programmers working for the Computer Center (which ran the IBM gear). It is quite possible he introduced me to it. If it was not native to TSS, a WAG is that he brought it with him. I’ll have to ask him. Clem Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 6:45 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I had meant to copy TUSH on this/ > > On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 2:41 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> I got excited by your mention of a S/360 version, but Doug's link talks >> about the GECOS version (GE/Honeywell hardware). >> >> Princeton had a S/360 version at about that time, it was a re-write of a >> version for the IBM 7094 done by Kernighan after spending a summer at MIT >> with CTSS and RUNOFF. I'm very curious whether the Princeton S/360 version >> spread to other locations. Found this article in the Daily Princetonian >> about the joy and history of ROFF. >> https://photos.app.goo.gl/zMWV1GRLZdNBUuP36 >> > >> On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 1:51 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote: >> >>> Just sharing a copy of the Roff Manual that I had forgotten I scanned a >>> little while back: >>> >>> https://archive.org/details/roff_manual >>> >>> This appears to be the UNIX complement to the S/360 version of the >>> paper backed up by Doug here: >>> https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/roff71/roff71.pdf >>> >>> From the best I could tell, this predates both 1973's V3 and the 1971 >>> S/360 version of the paper, putting it somewhere prior to 1971. For >>> instance, it is missing the .ar, .hx, .ig, .ix, .ni, .nx, .ro, .ta, and .tc >>> requests found in V3. The .ar and .ro, and .ta requests pop up in the >>> S/360 paper, the rest are in the V3 manpage (prior manpages don't list the >>> request summary). >>> >>> If anyone has some authoritative date information I can update the >>> archive description accordingly. >>> >>> Finally, this very well could be missing the last page, the Page >>> offset, Merge patterns, and Envoi sections of Doug's paper are not >>> reflected here, although at the very least, the .mg request is not in this >>> paper so the Merge patterns section probably wasn't there anyway. >>> >>> - Matt G. >>> >>