On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 2:38 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

The APS work started in the summer of 1979. See http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdf
and see some of the other stuff at
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html.

I think that's after V7 was released.

Ok, so that was clearly the first ditroff. 

Typesetter C must have been the original troff release which was separate from V6; but I don't remember what all was in the release.   Looking at the v6 distribution tape I have, the assembler versions of roff and nroff was there; but not troff.   V7 clearly shows the original troff in the sources.

The order I remember is this ... V5, V6, Patches, Typesetter C, TS, V7 ...   although TS and Typesetter might be switched but I know we got Typesetter C before we got V7.    Ted brought TS to us (in EE) and I thought that had the new compiler.   CS got TS from us in EE.    But somebody at CMU had wanted troff because we had the XGP in CS that we drive with Scribe (I want to say that was EE but I don't remember who was involved).   So I have memory of somebody hacking on the compiler at some point.  The POR (which if ever came to bear at CMU was after I left) was some type of hacking on troff to support the XGP.  Given the time Aharon points out, it might have been direct support it or it might have been something like vcat - I was not involved.   Klone might remember more of that.

Clearly from the time, ditroff did not yet exist.   The more I think about it, Brian K actually might know some of the story.  Scribe was Brian Reid's PhD Thesis and Brian K was on Reid's committee at the time and I'm guessing could somehow have been mixed up.

FWIW: Compiler hacking at CMU stands out in my mind because of the 11/40e had CSAV/CRET instructions.  The CS versions of the compilers generated code using that, because they had 11/40e with CMU WCS options.  The rest of us in EE, BioMed, Mellon Institute etc were running on 11/34's or 11/34A which could not handle those binaries (no WCS).   So I personally spent time tracking the CS versions of the compiler and bringing things to EE, trying to keep thing clean.  That was one of my jobs at the time.

That's fairly sure of the order, because we had Typesetter C at CMU in the Summer '78 when were we negotiating the 'university' commercial V7 license with Al Arms [which I was personally mixed up -- the finally ruling/agreement was license one system as a commercial system at the $20K fee and a university, could then use UNIX for back office and commercial style uses like Industry.  Al did not require the $5K second CPU stuff from the Universities, if they got a single $20K license; everyone was happy - details off list or another thread if you want them; although I will say CMU was first in early '79, followed by Case in late 1979].

So again, I try to date by things I know are fixed in time and then work from there.   As Dan points out the cross pollination was high in those days and it was not just from the labs to the Universities.  For instance, Ted took fsck back to Summit & MH, as well as a number of other tools (although I think that one had the longest reach).   Noel has mentioned similar stories from MIT.  Chesson brought all the networking stuff from UoI and we saw some of it in datakit (an earlier version of his mpx code for V7 he did as a grad student).   You get the idea....

Clem