[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 09:04:32PM -0500, josh wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Given the recent (awesome) discussions about the history of *roff and TeX, I
> thought I'd ask about where Brian Reid's Scribe system fits in with all this.
> His thesis is available online here:
> http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf, and in my
> opinion is very interesting (also cites papers on roff and TeX). Does anybody
> know if Scribe was ever used on Unix systems? Does it exist at all today?

Scribe was used at Project Athena at MIT, where it was running on BSD
4.3+ on Vax/750's.  So it was definitely used on Unix systems.  There
were thesis templates for Undergraduates using both Scribe and LaTeX.
LaTeX was pretty painfully slow on 1 MIPS machines, but it was better
at typesetting complex math equations, which gave it the edge for
people majoring in Math, Compter Science, and Engineering degrees.

My impression was that Scribe was a bit more popular for people
majoring in Humanities (at MIT, Theater, Music, Social Studies,
Foreign Languages, etc., were all collapsed into a single department,
aka Course 21 --- and there *were* some people who ended up graduating
with an undergraduate degree in Course 21, with a concentration in,
say, Theater or Music).

Speaking of typesetting equations, how would people compare eqn versus
LaTeX?  I used nroff for man pages, but I never did learn how to use
eqn for nroff.

						- Ted