[TUHS] The (un)importance of roff

Thhis is a cross-posting from the groff mailing list, where it was speculated that without roff there might be no Unix. Old hands will be familiar with the story. The patent department and the AT&T president's office are the only in-house examples I know where Unix was adopted because of *roff. The important adoptions, which led Berk Tague to found a separate Unix Support Group, were mainstream telephone applications and PWB, a Unix-based IDE. The first telephone application happened in the field. An engineer in Charlotte, NC, heard of this cheap easily programmed system and proposed to use it to automate the scheduling and dispatch of maintenance on the floor of a wire center. Ken visited to help get them started. The first Bell Labs telephone application was automating the analysis of central-office trouble reports. These had been voluminous stacks of punched cards that reported every anomaly detected in huge electromechanical switches. The Unix application captured the data on line and identfied systematic failures in real time. The patent adoption was a direct result of Joe Ossanna's salesmaship. Other early adopters were self-motivated, but the generous support lent by Ken, Joe, and others was certainly a tipping force that helped turn isolated events into a self-sustaining movement. Doug