5 ms·
> the charter sought was not merely to write some (unspecified) operating system, but instead to create a system specifically designed for editing and formattin
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> the charter sought was not merely to write some (unspecified) operating system, but instead to create a system specifically designed for editing and formatting text, what might today be called a ‘word-processing system.’
That's an interesting perspective. Was the shell intended to be a glorified word processor, with tools like sort, uniq, wc? In a documentary from the early 1980s, Kernighan also demonstrates this as a "killer" feature of Unix:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
- Beermotor 3y agoIIRC it was initially employed for their payroll system to help print checks.
- p_l 3y agoFirst commercial use in Bell Labs is usually credited as the secretarial pool for writing patent applications.
- somat 3y agoI always give an ironic chuckle when fighting the print system on a unix machine(lpd, lp, cups...) the internal rant that goes with it is something like. "Printing was THE original purpose, the reason for existence, of unix, you would think it would be a solved problem instead of the terrible mismatch of sins that it is."
- screechingbagel 3y agoprinting on unix in my experience is quite painless compared to windows for example, in my experience it just works :p
- MarkusWandel 3y agoHere's Ken Thompson talking about it (the word processing angle) quite entertainingly: https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1494 https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1494
- leoc 3y agoAnd in particular troff, which played a role similar to the one LaTeX plays today.
- pjmlp 3y agoI think LaTeX is less relevant today than it used to be like a decade ago. Outside academia, most people will rather use pandoc, asciiDoc or some Markdown dialect instead.
- dragonwriter 3y agoLaTeX is good for typesetting, AsciiDoc/Markdown/RST is good for maintaining basically-readable-as-text documentation that can also render to various presentation formats. In many cases, if those output options include typeset documents, the toolchain that gets there uses LaTeX, though the most common output format is usually HTML.