12 May
2018
12 May
'18
1:40 a.m.
I have read that one of the first groups in AT&T to use early Unix was
the legal dep't, specifically to use *roff to write patent
applications. Can anyone elaborate on this or supply references?
(This would in great contrast to today, where most applications are
written with certain products despite the USPTO, EPO, and others only
accepting PDF versions.) It would also be interesting to learn how
the writers were taught *roff, what editors were used, and what they
thought. (I recall that the secretaries, as they were then called, in
the math dep't used vi to compose plain TeX documents and xdvi to
proofread them.)
N.
12 May
12 May
2 a.m.
On May 11, 2018, at 6:40 PM, Nemo
<cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It would also be interesting to learn how
the writers were taught *roff, what editors were used, and what they
thought. (I recall that the secretaries, as they were then called, in
the math dep't used vi to compose plain TeX documents and xdvi to
proofread them.)
The original AT&T patents work would have pre-dated vi and TeX, so they would have
been using ed and [nt]roff I would guess. The BSTJ is probably a good starting point for
the early history.
In the mid-late 1980s I helped deploy UNIX into a court reporting company that had been
using Convergent Ngen workstations to edit and proof court transcripts. Within a couple
of months we had the court reporters trained up on vi, spell, troff, etc. They would
upload their tapes from the steno machine to the UNIX server, edit and proof the
documents, then typeset the results to a Postscript printer. Those masters would then be
duplicated and sent out to the customers.
Of the dozen or so reporters working there, at least three or four wrote their own troff
macro packages, along with an assortment of awk scripts to help catch errors in the
transcript source documents.
Today, when I hear people bitch about not having Word on their desktop, I just laugh ;-)
--lyndon
3:26 a.m.
And you tell that to the young people of today. and they won't believe you.
Arrgghh! It was the four *Yorkshiremen*, of course... 
17 May
17 May
3:28 p.m.
We laugh, but I've found that it can be true (up-hill in both directions)!
Let me explain...
I used to ride my bicycle around the top of a large hill. It went up and
down, but I ended up in the same place that I started. One would think
that, since I ended up in the same place, I necessarily went up-hill and
down-hill the same amount - but not true!
It took me an hour to ride around that hill. The up-hill parts were hard
and I went slowly. The down-hill parts were fast and easy. Turns out, I'd
spend 45 minutes going up-hill and 15 minutes going-down-hill. Not equal!
So, while I may have "theoretically" went up and down the same amount. In
terms of time and my perceptions, it was up-hill most of the way!
Blake McBride
On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 10:19 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Sat, 12 May 2018, Dave Horsfall wrote:
<accent=Irish>
And you tell that to the young people of today. and they won't believe
you.
Arrgghh! It was the four *Yorkshiremen*, of course...
-- Dave
12 May
12 May
4:30 a.m.
On 05/11/2018 08:00 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
Of the dozen or so reporters working there, at least
three or four wrote
their own troff macro packages, along with an assortment of awk scripts
to help catch errors in the transcript source documents.
I'll believe it.
My step mother is a court reporter and she's told me many stories about
how she and her colleagues have created custom dictionaries, processing
macros (in their proprietary software), and a lot of other things that
most computer users simply don't do any more.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
6:34 a.m.
On Fri, 11 May 2018, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
My step mother is a court reporter and she's told
me many stories about
how she and her colleagues have created custom dictionaries, processing
macros (in their proprietary software), and a lot of other things that
most computer users simply don't do any more.
A court reporter? I knew a bird once; she was a court reporter in a
previous life, and had short-hand for "and he said" etc...
-- Dave
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9 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
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Blake McBride -
Dave Horsfall -
Grant Taylor -
Lyndon Nerenberg -
Nemo