14 Jan
2022
14 Jan
'22
1:38 p.m.
The name 'ditroff' for Device Independent Troff was how AT&T marketed /
sold / licensed it when they released it to the world. The new name
was necessary to distinguish it from the original troff in V7 / System III /
System V.
It's understandable that inside Research no such distinction was made.
Nonetheless, the V8 and V10 archives show that the C/A/T variant was
still around (at least in /usr/src/cmd) under the name otroff.
HTH,
Arnold
Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dennis spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the troff
code in the late
1980s, if I remember right, moving it to modern C. He got annoyed by it one
day. It was the "ditroff" variant although honestly I don't remember us
ever calling it that. It was just the current version of troff. Not sure
where the name came from. Perhaps it was us but I think of it as a foreign
name.
-rob
On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 11:05 AM Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
> Most of y'all are aware of Brian Kernighan's troff involvement. My
> understanding is that he pretty much took over nroff/troff after Joe Ossana
> died, and came out with ditroff.
>
> But Brian had much earlier involvement with non-UNIX *roff. When he was
> pursuing his PhD at Princeton, he spent a summer at MIT using CTSS and
> RUNOFF. When he came back to P'ton, he wrote a ROFF for the IBM 7094,
> later translated to the IBM 360. Many generations of students, myself
> included, use the IBM ROFF (batch, not interactive) as a much friendlier
> alternative to dumb typewriters. I don't know if 360 ROFF spread beyond
> Princeton, but I wouldn't be surprised.
>
> BTW, during my summer at Bell, nroff/troff was one of the few programs I
> could not port to the Interdata 8/32 - it was just a mess of essentially
> typeless code. I don't think Joe Ossana got around to it either before he
> died.
>
> --
> - Tom
>