4 ms·
Mentioned here: UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-History-and-a-Memoir_RuLit_Me_616356.pdf https://www.rulit.
by tniemi 4y ago
Mentioned here:
UNIX: A History and a Memoir
https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-History-and-a-Memoir_RuLit_Me_616356.pdf https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-Hist...
5.3 Early Formatters
The problem was that there was no interactive
computer system like CTSS at Princeton; there weren’t any computer termi-
nals either. All that was available was punch cards, which only supported
upper case letters. I wrote Roff in Fortran (far from ideal, since Fortran was
meant for scientific computation, not pushing characters around, but there
were no other options) and I added a feature to convert everything to lower
case while automatically capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. The
resulting text, now upper and lower case, was printed on an IBM 1403 printer
that could print both cases. Talk about bleeding edge! My thesis was three
boxes of cards. Each box held 2,000 cards, was about 14 inches (35 cm) long
and weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg). The first 1,000 cards were the program and
the other 5,000 were the thesis itself in Roff.
- scoopertrooper 4y agoYou can still use it today! https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/ https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/
- baruchel 4y agoI still use Troff as my daily typesetting tool. But I don't use Groff which doesn't handle utf-8 and is rather bad for accurate formatting. I use the less known Heirloom Troff, which is very good.
- vt240 4y ago"For some years afterwards, there was a student agency that would “roff” documents for students for a modest fee. Roff was thus the first program I ever wrote that was used by other people in any significant way." That's the best part of the story!