14 May
2018
14 May
'18
6:19 p.m.
Here's part of the story.
From: "Doug McIlroy"
<doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
To:<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Fri, 16 Dec 2016 21:09:16 -0500
Subject:[TUHS] How Unix made it
to the top
It has often been told how the Bell Labs law department became the
first non-research department to use Unix, displacing a newly acquired
stand-alone word-processing system that fell short of the department's
hopes because it couldn't number the lines on patent applications,
as USPTO required. When Joe Ossanna heard of this, he told them about
nroff and promised to give it line-numbering capability the next day.
They tried it and were hooked. Patent secretaries became remote
members of the fellowship of the Unix lab. In due time the law
department got its own machine.
Come to think of it, they must already have had a machine, probably
leased from the commercial word-processing company, for they had DEC
tapes they needed to convert to Unix format. Several of us in the Unix
lab spent a memorable afternoon decoding the proprietary format. It was
finally broken when we computed a bitwise autocorrelation function. It
had a big peak at seven. The tapes were pure ASCII rather than bytewise
ASCII--a lot of work for very little data compression.
As for training, the secretaries had to learn nroff and ed plus the
usual lot of ls, mkdir, mv, cp, rm. The patent department had to invest
in modems and order phone lines to plug them into. I don't know what
terminals they used.
From this distant point in time it seems that it all
happened in a couple
of weeks. Joe Ossanna did most of the teaching, and no doubt
supplied
samples to copy. As far as I know the only other instructional materials
would have been man pages and the nroff manual (forbiddingly terse,
though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.
Doug
14 May
14 May
6:41 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Here's part of the story.
[...]
You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for
their C/A/T photo-typesetter? At least, that was the lore that I heard...
And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
-- Dave
7 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Hi Dave,
Doug McIlroy wrote:
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter) came later, and
with it the need to support more complex devices than nroff, `new roff'.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
Here's part of the story.
You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff"
for
their C/A/T photo-typesetter? At least, that was the lore that I
heard... 
8:45 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff. Which begat new roff - aka nroff. both
assume an ASR 37 as the output device. When the first typesetter was procured typesetter
roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is a binary
format). This is also were typesetter C comes from. Note these are 3 separate and
different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input language. These
were included in V5/6/7 IIRC
When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff’s author, Brian rewrote
the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff which also
could support ASCII output nroff style
This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.
Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today’s groff which takes mostly a
superset of the ditroff input language.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Here's part of the story.
[...]
You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for
their C/A/T photo-typesetter? At least, that was the lore that I heard...
And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
-- Dave 
9:04 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create
today???s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.
Yep. In early C++ which I found questionable but he made it work.
One of the superset things is something I got him to do in pic, the
'i'th construct. This chunk of pic:
for i = 1 to units by 1 do {
line <-> dashed from `i'th [].C.s - (.10, 0) to \
last box.nw + (i/(units+1)*w, 0)
}
is part of the code that produces this:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/sunbox.pdf
and I could change "units" and have more or less machines. That's a
diagram
of the first cluster that Sun shipped, code named sunbox, shipped as
SparcCluster I. My baby, never went anywhere, but my product marketing
guy came up to me about a decade later, after Google was a thing, and
said "I guess you were right about that clustering idea" :)
Source for the diagram is here:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/pic/sunbox.pic
Traditional troff can't handle that unless someone backported the 'i'th
construct (which is obvious, right?).
--lm
9:11 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
BTW, I still find pic really useful, I use it to lay out stuff because
you can draw stuff to scale. I've used it to lay out my shop, furniture
I've built, where I trenched ethernet, etc. The fact that you can scale
the picture means you can do stuff in inches or feet or whatever you like,
scale it to fit on a page, get it the way you want and then read off the
real life dimensions.
I don't know of any other tool that lets you do drawings like that, they
are all point and click which I find far less useful. I like pic because
you can (well I can) look at the code and see the picture. I find that
very elegant.
At UWisc we had something called xfig that spit out pic but it was really
crappy pic, useless to edit. Does anyone know of anything that is like
that that spits out pic that you could read? Or a similar tool? Or is
pic still the best?
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:04:31AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
Ditroff was
reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today???s groff which takes mostly a superset of
the ditroff input language.
Yep. In early C++ which I found questionable but he made it work.
One of the superset things is something I got him to do in pic, the
'i'th construct. This chunk of pic:
for i = 1 to units by 1 do {
line <-> dashed from `i'th [].C.s - (.10, 0) to \
last box.nw + (i/(units+1)*w, 0)
}
is part of the code that produces this:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/sunbox.pdf
and I could change "units" and have more or less machines. That's a
diagram
of the first cluster that Sun shipped, code named sunbox, shipped as
SparcCluster I. My baby, never went anywhere, but my product marketing
guy came up to me about a decade later, after Google was a thing, and
said "I guess you were right about that clustering idea" :)
Source for the diagram is here:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/pic/sunbox.pic
Traditional troff can't handle that unless someone backported the 'i'th
construct (which is obvious, right?).
--lm 
9:21 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Larry McVoy writes:
BTW, I still find pic really useful, ...
I use pic all the time. One of the things that I find most useful, which
is unfortunately not supported by things like xfig, is invisible elements.
I draw most complicated pictures by constructing scaffold of invisible items
and hanging the visible items onto it. That way, if I start running out of
space I can just shrink the scaffold. Sure beats having to rescale piles of
elements and then move them around in WYSIWYG packages.
Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
won't do troff. Not a serious script as it just looks for macro names, it
doesn't expand and interpret all of the low-level requests. But, part of
the script extracts pic images into separate files, runs them through groff,
converts the output to PDF, converts that to SVG, runs it through inkscape
in batch mode to crop excess whitespace from the image, and then imports it
into the OpenOffice documents. Of course, while SVG is the only vector
graphics format that OpenOffic supports, it makes a mess of it and converts
it to bitmaps internally. But, it works with the publisher's production
toolchain as they can work on the SVG images separately.
Once again, a testament to "little languages" and "composable tools".
Jon
9:46 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
+1
You should share your scripts, I've done similar stuff and other people
have sometimes found it useful.
I do the same thing with the invis stuff, super handy.
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:21:26AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Larry McVoy writes:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
BTW, I still find pic really useful, ...
I use pic all the time. One of the things that I find most useful, which
is unfortunately not supported by things like xfig, is invisible elements.
I draw most complicated pictures by constructing scaffold of invisible items
and hanging the visible items onto it. That way, if I start running out of
space I can just shrink the scaffold. Sure beats having to rescale piles of
elements and then move them around in WYSIWYG packages.
Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
won't do troff. Not a serious script as it just looks for macro names, it
doesn't expand and interpret all of the low-level requests. But, part of
the script extracts pic images into separate files, runs them through groff,
converts the output to PDF, converts that to SVG, runs it through inkscape
in batch mode to crop excess whitespace from the image, and then imports it
into the OpenOffice documents. Of course, while SVG is the only vector
graphics format that OpenOffic supports, it makes a mess of it and converts
it to bitmaps internally. But, it works with the publisher's production
toolchain as they can work on the SVG images separately.
Once again, a testament to "little languages" and "composable
tools".
Jon
9:57 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Larry McVoy writes:
+1
You should share your scripts, I've done similar stuff and other people
have sometimes found it useful.
I do the same thing with the invis stuff, super handy.
Well, they're all one-offs so not sure hoe generally useful they are.
Oh, one more great thing about pic is the ease at which other programs
can generate it; I do that a lot when a picture is produced from a pile
of data.
10:41 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in part):
Also, as part of the book project, I have a script
that I've written that
converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
won't do troff.
I am curious about PHI. Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and
says that all his books are written in troff). Not much on the PHI website.
N.
15 May
15 May
12:13 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Nemo Nusquam <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in part):
This is getting off-topic. Prentice Hall (Pearson) generally works with
Word but they are able to make allowance for other formats. For sure TeX,
and they can work with troff if the author wants to provide the "camera
ready copy" themselves (see, for example, Brian's book on Go, done with
groff).
I wrote my PH book in Texinfo and the converted it to DocBook XML; they
used a contractor to actually go from there to typesettable copy.
Arnold
Also, as part of the book project, I have a
script that I've written that
converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
won't do troff.
I am curious about PHI. Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and
says that all his books are written in troff). Not much on the PHI website.
N.
12:18 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
arnold(a)skeeve.com writes:
Nemo Nusquam <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, this issue, at least in my case, isn't troff per-se. It's that editors
and such want to be able to read test, make comments in the margins, and track
changes. I would claim that troff, tex, et. al. are great tools for people
who write stuff and shepherd it to publication which is great for specs and
technical papers and all that. What's lacking is tools for the involvement
of third-parties such as editors.
Jon
On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in
part):
This is getting off-topic. Prentice Hall (Pearson) generally works with
Word but they are able to make allowance for other formats. For sure TeX,
and they can work with troff if the author wants to provide the "camera
ready copy" themselves (see, for example, Brian's book on Go, done with
groff).
I wrote my PH book in Texinfo and the converted it to DocBook XML; they
used a contractor to actually go from there to typesettable copy.
Arnold Also, as part of the book project, I have a
script that I've written that
converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
won't do troff.
I am curious about PHI. Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and
says that all his books are written in troff). Not much on the PHI website.
N.
12:25 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 11:18:48AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
arnold(a)skeeve.com writes:
I've successfully used troff to write our commercial contract.
I collaborated with a guy at Fenwick&West, taught him enough troff -ms
that he could make changes. We sourced 6 different contracts from one doc
and the lawyer *loved* that, he really wanted that fuctionality in Word.
Nemo Nusquam <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, this issue, at least in my case, isn't troff per-se. It's that editors
and such want to be able to read test, make comments in the margins, and track
changes. I would claim that troff, tex, et. al. are great tools for people
who write stuff and shepherd it to publication which is great for specs and
technical papers and all that. What's lacking is tools for the involvement
of third-parties such as editors. On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in
part):
This is getting off-topic. Prentice Hall (Pearson) generally works with
Word but they are able to make allowance for other formats. For sure TeX,
and they can work with troff if the author wants to provide the "camera
ready copy" themselves (see, for example, Brian's book on Go, done with
groff).
I wrote my PH book in Texinfo and the converted it to DocBook XML; they
used a contractor to actually go from there to typesettable copy.
Arnold Also, as part of the book project, I have a
script that I've written that
converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
won't do troff.
I am curious about PHI. Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and
says that all his books are written in troff). Not much on the PHI website.
N. 
12:33 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
I've successfully used troff to write our commercial contract.
I collaborated with a guy at Fenwick&West, taught him enough troff -ms
that he could make changes. We sourced 6 different contracts from one doc
and the lawyer *loved* that, he really wanted that fuctionality in Word.
I may need to start doing that for the routine leases I do for some rental
property I own. I lamely just do some word fill in the blank things now,
but I may have to switch :)
Warner
14 May
14 May
9:04 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On May 14, 2018, at 10:45 AM, Clem cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff. Which begat new roff - aka nroff. both
assume an ASR 37 as the output device. When the first typesetter was procured typesetter
roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is a binary
format). This is also were typesetter C comes from. Note these are 3 separate and
different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input language. These
were included in V5/6/7 IIRC
When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff’s author, Brian
rewrote the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff
which also could support ASCII output nroff style
This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.
Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today’s groff which takes mostly a
superset of the ditroff input language.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
>> On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>>
>> Here's part of the story.
>
> [...]
>
> You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff"
for their C/A/T photo-typesetter? At least, that was the lore that I heard...
>
> And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
>
> -- Dave
9:33 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
You may be right. It seems to be shortly after the '78 release of V7.
For the full story on ditroff, see Brian's papers on it at
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html . They are fascinating
(and fun!) reading.
Arnold
Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later
with ditroff.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
> On May 14, 2018, at 10:45 AM, Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
>
> Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff. Which begat new roff - aka nroff.
both assume an ASR 37 as the output device. When the first typesetter was procured
typesetter roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is
a binary format). This is also were typesetter C comes from. Note these are 3
separate and different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input
language. These were included in V5/6/7 IIRC
>
>
>
> When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff???s author, Brian
rewrote the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff
which also could support ASCII output nroff style
>
> This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.
>
> Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today???s groff which takes
mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.
>
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
>
>>> On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>>>
>>> Here's part of the story.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been
"troff" for their C/A/T photo-typesetter? At least, that was the lore that I
heard...
>>
>> And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing
me)?
>>
>> -- Dave
15 May
15 May
3:32 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later
with ditroff.
No.
What I remember, there was first roff written in assembler. It was
then rewrittn into C (but now with real macro capabilities. roff
has a lt build in), Typesetter C appeared in Edition 6.1 (of 6.2)
since the n/troff code demanded a lot from the C-compiler. To make
it possible to run it on a pdp11 there was the hack turning data
into test (for the hyphenation tables). Ditroff was done by bwk
to be devie independent.
Regards,
jaap
3:35 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 5:32 PM, Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna(a)xs4all.nl> wrote:
Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.
No.
What I remember, there was first roff written in assembler. It was
then rewrittn into C (but now with real macro capabilities. roff
has a lt build in), Typesetter C appeared in Edition 6.1 (of 6.2)
since the n/troff code demanded a lot from the C-compiler. To make
it possible to run it on a pdp11 there was the hack turning data
into test (for the hyphenation tables). Ditroff was done by bwk
to be devie independent.
Regards,
jaap
Thanks -- this make sense and it the piece that I could not remember.
ᐧ
14 May
14 May
10:37 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Hi Clem,
This is also were typesetter C comes from.
What's that?
--
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
5:42 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
CAT = Computer Assisted Typesetter. It was built by a company called
Graphic Systems (GSI). It was the original device troff was done for.
Many of the original troff limitations go to the fact it was driving this
device: there are only four fonts. These are held on film strips on a
drum. Not the most sophisticated font system, but ahead of its time. It
had only been on the market for two years when the labs got it and wrote
troff.
I believe the one we had access to (and used for the previously mentioned
versatec emulation) was at the Naval Research Laboratory.
14 May
14 May
8:34 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:19:50AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro
package, but I doubt
it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.
And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the
others, I like -ms best).
8:46 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
+1
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On May 14, 2018, at 10:34 AM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:19:50AM -0400, Doug
McIlroy wrote:
though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.
And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the
others, I like -ms best).
15 May
15 May
3:02 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Mon, 14 May 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
And still, all these years later, my macro package of
choice (tried the
others, I like -ms best).
I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
I used to joke that the only way that I'll write in -mm is if I was paid
to do so :-) And it won't be cheap...
-- Dave
8:07 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for
some reason I still
preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
8:37 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came
with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it
was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
- Dan C.
On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
wrote (in part):
> I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I
still
> preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more
"natural", and I still use it
to
this day
(well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
8:55 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
The PWB children used -mm I seem to remember that the base system 3 and maybe the
original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If you pulled from BSD or
ditroff; you got it.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came with troff and
the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it was (or if I'm just
imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
- Dan C.
I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm;
for some reason I still
preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
8:59 p.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff. I feel like there
was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose. So far
as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
originals.
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
The PWB children used -mm I seem to remember that the
base system 3 and maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If
you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
> On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
> > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still
use it to
> > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> >
> > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
>
> I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came with troff
and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it was (or if I'm
just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
>
> - Dan C.
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
9:13 p.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 8:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like
sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff. I feel like there
was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose. So far
as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
originals.
learn was in BSD distributions, though they never made the leap to
{Net,Open,Free}BSD in any useful way because the source material had become
dated by then.
Warner
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole
wrote:
The PWB children used -mm I seem to remember
that the base system 3 and
maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff
was not apart. If
you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
quite.
> On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason
I
still
> > > preferred -ms, as it somehow
seemed more "natural", and I still
use it to
> > > this day (well, when I'm not
using the Mac, that is).
> >
> > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
>
> I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that
came with
troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which
it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
>
> - Dan C.
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
9:14 p.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like
sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff. I feel like there
was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose. So far
as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
originals.
I think you mean 'style' and 'diction'. I thought those came from
research?
I remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or
4.2/4.3BSD? Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing it with
BSD, but I thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick look shows a
copy in 7th Ed.
- Dan C.
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
The PWB
children used -mm I seem to remember that the base system 3 and
maybe the original
sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If
you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
quite.
> On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason
I
still
> > > preferred -ms, as it somehow
seemed more "natural", and I still
use it to
> > > this day (well, when I'm not
using the Mac, that is).
> >
> > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
>
> I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that
came with
troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which
it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
>
> - Dan C.
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
16 May
16 May
1:48 a.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
I think you mean 'style' and
'diction'. I thought those came from research? I
remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or 4.2/4.3BSD?
IIRC they were written up in the BSTJ "Unix" number.
Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing
it with BSD, but I
thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick look shows a copy in 7th Ed.
I remmber learn being present on at least one early Xenix release I played
with. I've long forgotten the details of which release, though.
2:33 a.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
My recollection of the research/PWB split (I wasn't in either center) was
that research (wisely) decided not to get into the business of software
support or committing to a stable system, so PWB forked off to be a
supported, stable version of UNIX. It was used by many of the computer
centers within the Labs because of the promise of support and stability.
Support included published manuals, with the hand of Ted Dollota (whose
first language wasn't even English) creating some amazingly good documents.
There was some idea exchange between research/and PWB (like the Mashey
shell and the Bourne shell incorporating support for what is now thought of
as "here documents"), but research was focused on innovation and PWB was
focused on support. AT&T management no doubt were looking to an OS on their
(IMHO mostly disastrous) entry into the computer business, for which they
agreed to be broken up.
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 3:48 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon(a)orthanc.ca> wrote:
I think you mean 'style' and
'diction'. I thought those came from
research? I
remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or 4.2/4.3BSD?
IIRC they were written up in the BSTJ "Unix" number.
Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing it with BSD, but I
thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick
look shows a copy in 7th
Ed.
I remmber learn being present on at least one early Xenix release I played
with. I've long forgotten the details of which release, though.
3:11 a.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 4:33 PM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
AT&T management no doubt were looking to an OS on
their (IMHO mostly
disastrous) entry into the computer business, for which they agreed to be
broken up.
Actually, I think the behavior at the time shows that they wanted to be in
the hardware business -- *e.g. the 3B20*
*vs. DEC and IBM's offerings of the day*. What they failed to understand
was to be in the SW business it meant that their customers (IBM, DEC, HP,
Microsoft) needed to succeed in selling >>their own<< hardware by using
AT&T's SW.
ᐧ
ᐧ
3:41 a.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
Actually, I think the behavior at the time shows that
they wanted to be in the
hardware business -- e.g. the 3B20
And for that they failed miserably.
I still throw up upon hearing the phrase "3B4000." What a horrible,
horrible, piece of hardware.
15 May
15 May
9:14 p.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
On 5/15/2018 7:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like
sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff. I feel like there
was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose. So far
as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
originals.
We used PWB at Ford Aerospace in the late 70s. It might have been
the closest to a commercial Unix version there was back then. John
Mashey had a lot to do with PWB so maybe he can say a few words about
it if he's on here.
It's ironic - back in the late 70s there were almost as many
variations of Unix as there are Linux distributions now. It made the
commercial software vendors crazy because each required separate
development and QA resources, and none of them had enough traction
to be the only version that a vendor would support (like maybe
RedHat now).
Jon Forrest
9:38 p.m.
New subject: PWB - what is the history?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like
sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.
Actually PWB (1.0) gave on you of your favorite tools -- SCCS ;-)
V6 was semi-widely distributed to the Academics. Basically the tier-1 CS
schools all had it, but it was probably few than 50-75 licenses. It was
also were the first commercial use license was written (originally for Rand
Corp).
Programmer's Workbench - aka PWB was John Mashey and team in Whippany.
They took a V6 system and make some changes, primarily in how groups
worked and added a bunch of user level tools that made it easier to write
and maintain long term commercial software that was being sent out the Bell
Operating Companies -- IIRC the #5ESS project was a big driver but I'm less
sure of that.
PWB was not officially released to the Universities it was originally only
available inside the Bell System, but because of the commerical use license
AT&T started to rethink. BTW: some of the University got it from AT&T
employees that brought it with them. This was how SCCS made it to UCB
because it was not part of the research editions. Who brought it, there I
never knew. Noel may know how it made it to MIT, it came to CMU from Phill
Karn and Ted Kowalski.
PWB 2.0 was released a few years later and was based on the UNIX/TS kernel
and some other changes and it was around this time that the UNIX Support
Group was formed in Summit, where aps, Ted, and Steve Johnson spent time.
This got even less widely used outside of the Bell System because V7 had
been released which also based on the UNIX/TS kernel. I believe that this
was released via Summit, but Steve or aps may know more.
With V7 there also came the first commercial binary redistribution license,
and commercial use license was modified for the first time.
Judge Green broke the Bell System up....
So, AT&T started to negotiate with 10 commercial firms that had
redistribution licenses and we also customers of Prof Allison at Stanford
who brokered the meetings [I was the technical rep from Tektronix, along
with a lawyer]. I'm not sure I can remember everyone in the room at
Ricki's Hyatt. But Gates was there from Microsoft (only time I ever met
him), Bill Munson from DEC, I've forgotten the HP and IBM reps, 3Com was
Metcalfe, was SCO and few others. I can see a picture of the faces in my
mind, I just can not remember the names]. What I remember was Gates saying
'You guys don't get it. The only thing that matters for SW is Volume' --
they wanted to pay $25 a copy max and DEC/IBM/HP thought $1500-2000 was
just fine, since their average systems cost was $150K.
So ... PWB 3.0 came about 2-3 years later and Research was supposed to be
out of the distribution business and the new commercial license was created
from that negotiation. AT&T is allowed to be in the computer business
and renamed it System III. But if you look at the printed manual, it had
already been created and calls it PWB 3.0.
Clem
PS learn, style and diction were part of 7th edition BTW...
ᐧ
9:10 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55 AM, Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I
still
> > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed
more "natural", and I still use
it to
> > > this day (well, when I'm not using
the Mac, that is).
> >
> > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
>
> I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came
with
troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it
was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
The PWB children used -mm I seem to remember that the base system 3 and
maybe the
original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If
you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
Maybe that's what it was. Let's see, System V's I have known and
loathed[*]:
AIX on RT and RS/6k, Irix, HP-UX, UNISYS, Solaris 2.x for x in 2-5; perhaps
others that I can't recall now.
Perhaps it was one of them? For some reason, AIX is sticking out in my head
as not having the full compliment of troff macros as supplied by BSD
distributions. Something *definitely* didn't come with -me, though I can't
recall what now.
- Dan C.
[*] "Loathed" is entirely too strong of a word, but in the enthusiasm of
first exposure combined with the headiness (read: ignorance) of youth, it
was easy to fall prey to the tribalism of the pro-BSD people on my campus;
the response was less rational and more emotional. That said, we've covered
in great depth on this list how Solaris 2.x, in particular, was rushed to
market too early; attempts at conversion from SunOS 4.x were fraught and
that left a bad taste for some time. Like wanting to wear the same jacket
as a rock star, wanting to run the same software as one's idols was an
attempt to gather some amount of cachet that was unwarranted. But just as
the music I listened to when I was 8 years old was dramatically different
than the music that I liked at 13, which is still somewhat removed from
that which I listen to most often now (though curiously there is much more
continuity there), I find that I wouldn't really want to go back to SunOS 4
on a SPARCstation 1, let alone 4.3BSD on a VAX, even with a relatively nice
HP or DEC terminal.
6:20 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Me too.
Larry McVoy wrote:
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:19:50AM -0400, Doug McIlroy
wrote:
I think honor for the first real macro package
goes to Lesk's -ms.
And still, all these years later, my macro package of choice (tried the
others, I like -ms best).
14 May
14 May
9:10 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Hi.
Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
From this distant point in time it seems that it all
happened in a couple
of weeks. Joe Ossanna did most of the teaching, and no doubt supplied
samples to copy. As far as I know the only other instructional materials
would have been man pages and the nroff manual (forbiddingly terse,
though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.
Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?
Agreed, -man isn't for full-fledged "regular" documents and papers, but
in terms of removing the need for low-level *roff markup, it certainly
does the job.
(Of course, that may be what you meant by saying "the first *real* macro
package ...")
Thanks!
Arnold
2413
days inactive
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38 comments
17 participants
participants (17)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Clem cole -
Clem Cole
-
Dan Cross -
Dave Horsfall -
Doug McIlroy -
Jaap Akkerhuis -
John P. Linderman -
Jon Forrest -
Jon Steinhart -
Larry McVoy -
Lyndon Nerenberg -
Nemo -
Nemo Nusquam
-
Ralph Corderoy -
Ron Natalie -
Warner Losh