On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 1:51 PM Tony Finch <dot(a)dotat.at> wrote: Maybe - certainly true for the first 1K (more in a minute...) SRI just published them, my experience/memory from the time, was the authors wrote them locally, which as I said was more often than not, PDP6/10 in the 70s. Certainly was true at CMU, Stanford, and MIT. The problem was we all had XGPs (later Dovers) and original the Stanford PUB system (folks with PDP-10s seemed to have tended to switch to Scribe after it became available) but those without a custom output device, many other folks did not. PUB really wanted an XGP, not a line printer and the runoff family pretty much assumed an ASCII printer page. Scribe could handle either, as well as the newly emerging 'daisy wheel' printers. Actually, typesetters like the C/A/T or the APS-5 were not as popular in CS departments (probably because the cost per page, the nuisance of the chemistry *et al*. Although a lot of places that had a 'publications' team (DEC, BBN, *etc*) had them. Lasers printers (particularly PS based ones) were really another 3-5 years away, first Apple, then Imagen, and finally, HP licensed PS. So the RFC/IENs et al would have followed the preferred/economic technology of the time. Certainly true, but I would think that the transition was at least 5 years earlier, maybe 7-8 given the rise of the Vaxen, and using tools like vcat(1) like we used at UCB (and I had done previous to that at Tektronix). But that was really the important thing for the IEN/RFCs. When the 10's stopped being the backbone of the Arpanet (now Internet) and UNIX took the helm, the troff family started to be the primary tool. To be fair, the Pascal version of Tex appeared in the early 1980s, but it was not until the Latex (Scribe style Tex macros) and the UNIX/C support that it really began to take off. There were a number of reasons for this, but maybe because Pascal was a second class citizen to C may have hindered its acceptance. I can not say. I have friends that swear by it and have cursed troff forever, and others like me, that tend the other way (emacs *vs.* vi I think). It's funny, I learned runoff, PUB, Scribe, troff, or sort of tex in that order. I have a soft spot for Scribe, but I used it for such a short time, and troff became my primary tool. Like Larry, I still prefer troff (groff) today to the tex family as I have fewer problems doing complex stuff with it; but that may be the familiarity with it being the best tool available to me for so long. I suspect, the RFC publishers could be a similar story.

On 9/2/20 8:03 AM, Random832 wrote: RFC 2223 ("Instructions to RFC Authors") from October 1997 mentions -ms with a specific setup that is described in the appendix. It noted that "[g]enerally, we use the very simplest nroff features." For completeness: That RFC has later been amended by RFC 5741 ("RFC Streams, Headers, and Boilerplates") and RFC 6949 ("RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development"). (RFC 7990 from December 2016 then essentially did away with nroff as far as I can tell.) Interestingly, someone named Bruce Lilly made an effort to write a more extensive macro package specifically for the purpose of being used for RFCs, see I-D.draft-lilly-using-troff-04. Unlike the process based around the ms macros cut together with an awk script, his macros actually did the correct pagination on its own. Some of the things on the website linked there are lost by now, such as rfcref, idref and abnff, which were intended to integrate with that macro package. Fabio