Re: [TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

research? I They were in WWB (writers workbench) not PWB (programmers workbench). WWB was a suite of Unix programs, organized by Nina MacDonald of USG. It appeared in various Unix versions, including research v8-v10. Lorinda Cherry in research wrote most of the basic tools in WWB, most notably style, diction, and the really cool "parts" that underlay style. William Vesterman at Rutgers suggested style and diction. Having parts up her sleeve, Lorinda was able to turn them out almost overnight. Most anyone else would scarcely have known how to begin to make style. Just yesterday Lorinda received a Pioneer in Tech award from the National Center for Women in IT. Parts and eqn, both initiated by her, certainly justify that honor. [Parts did a remarkable job of tagging text with parts of speech, without getting bogged down in the swamp of parsing English. It was largely implemented in sed--certainly one of the grander programs written in that language. Style reported statistics like length of words, frequency of adjectives, and variety of sentence structure. Diction flagged cliches and other common infelicities. WWB offered advice based on the findings of these and other text-analysis programs.] Doug