[TUHS] earliest Unix roff
Warren Toomey
wkt at tuhs.org
Sat Sep 14 08:13:45 AEST 2019
On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 05:45:51PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> It does leave us an interesting question, when did the original roff(1)
> show up and when did nroff(1). The original, roff(1), was early, and
> of course not until after the original PDP-11/20 port. But was it as
> early as first edition? roff was the first formatting program. nroff
> replaced it later on, although roff lived through the 6th edition (I do
> not believe it is on the v7 tape).
There was a roff on PDP-7 Unix:
By the spring of 1971, it was generally agreed that no one had the
slightest interest in scrapping Unix. Therefore, we transliterated
the roff text formatter into PDP-11 assembler language, starting from
the PDP-7 version that had been transliterated from McIlroy’s BCPL
version on Multics, which had in turn been inspired by J. Saltzer’s
runoff program on CTSS.
>From "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System"
http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchie84evolution.pdf
Cheers, Warren
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