New subject: Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history

14 Jan 2022

...
  From: Angelo Papenhoff 
...
  to my knowledge no troff version before the C rewrite
in v7 
Apologies if I missed something, but between this list and COFF there's so
much low S/N traffic I skip a lot of it. Having said that, was there ever a
troff in assembler? I'd always had the impression that the first one was in C.

...
  The v6 distribution has deleted directory entries for
troff source but
 not the files themselves.  I hope it is not lost. Maybe someone here has
 an idea where it could be found? 
The MIT 'V6+' (I think it's probably basically PWB1) system had troff -
i guess it 'fell off the back of a truck', like a lot of other stuff MIT had,
such as 'typesetter C', the Portable C Compiler, etc.

Theirs was modified to produce output for a Varian (I forget which model,
maybe the docs or driver say).

nroff on that system seems to have been generated from the troff sources; the
assembler nroff sources aren't present.

I looked at its n1.c, and compared it to the V7 one:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/n1.c

and this one appears to be slightly earlier; e.g. it starts:

  #include "tdef.h"
  #include "t.h"
  #include "tw.h"
  /*
  troff1.c

  consume options, initialization, main loop,
  input routines, escape function calling
  */

  extern int stdi;

and in the argument processing, it has quite a lot fewer.

So that one is a "troff version before the C rewrite in .. v7", but it is in
C. Is that of any interest?

	Noel

Re: [TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history