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 >

1980s, if I remember right, moving it to modern C. He got annoyed by it one day. If I remember correctly, it was actually Ken. He also turned it in a single binary. (Troff -N turned it into nroff). 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. Originally Brian called it "Typesetter Independent Troff" in the article he wrote about it and for some reason people started to call it "Device Independent". jaap