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Re: [Groff] antiquity of troff
From: |
Meg McRoberts |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] antiquity of troff |
Date: |
Wed, 2 Jun 2010 01:50:39 -0700 (PDT) |
When I started at Bell Labs in 1983, we had nroff/mmx and then there
was troff that was only for typesetting. We wrote all the docs in nroff
then used troff to format this text for a typesetter and made any
necessary formatting changes on bluelines.
Pretty soon after that, we got device-independent troff, which was a
BIG DEAL! That enabled us to format documents with variable-width
characters and different fonts on just a regular printer, although it
really was not nearly as "device independent" as what we have now.
Does anyone know the history of mmx? When I started, mmx was the
command we used to produce formatted ASCII text from source that
used the *roff macros. I got the idea that it was an older tool which
was being linked to nroff at about that time...
--- On Tue, 6/1/10, Doug McIlroy <address@hidden> wrote:
From: Doug McIlroy <address@hidden>
Subject: [Groff] antiquity of troff
To: address@hidden
Date: Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 7:24 AM
> troff pre-dates C by quite a while
Actually not. C and nroff were contemporary--both debuted in 2nd edition Unix.
troff came in the 3rd edition. Of course nroff was preceded by roff, and
that by runoff; but neither of those had a | operator, which was the
triggering question. Certainly by the time | for absolute page coordinates
appeared in nroff/troff, C was well known to all involved.
roff, the original of which I wrote, did not have expressions, though
it did support constructions like .ps +2 to increment and decrement
parameters.