[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese at acm.org> wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>
> The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for
>> some time from a company called Unilogic, later Scribe Systems,
>
> There is a long (and somewhat nasty history history here).  Mike Shamus
> was a one-time CMU CS prof.   He created Unilogic and arranged for the IP
> to be transferred to him.   They had a transpiler that converted
> 'compatible BLISS' (*a.k.a*. Vax Bliss) to other languages.  I believe
> that a flavor of Pascal, Ada and C were possible outputs.   I'm not sure of
> the provenance of the transpiler.   Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC
> project - Product Quality Compiler Compiler, that Wulf and his students
> were working.  That work forked Tartan labs around the same time as
> Unilogic and I know transpilers had been part of the original work, but I
> never closed the loop.  To be honest they had to have been related in
> some manner, but that all happened after I had left.
>
> At that point, Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version
> to compatible BLISS on VAX/VMS.   Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for
> TOPS, Vax both VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other
> systems (maybe HP and AIX).  The sad part is that history seems to have
> lost both Scribe and the associated transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise,
> I'd love to hear something).
>

I understand that Stallman was deeply affected by both the closed nature of
and "time bombs" in Scribe.


> [snip]
>
> To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that
> with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not
> seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller).  IIRC Ken's
> program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also.  But FrameMaker (like
> Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear
> addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC.  I never really
> learned it although  Ken gave me a copy early on to play with.  IIRC our
> doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time
> were strictly roff as previously discussed).
>

Does anyone have any experience with Interleaf? That was another in the
lineage of document processors that seems to have fallen into history.

But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My
>> understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way
>> to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic
>> LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe.
>>
> Indeed - that is what I have been told.  I am under the impression that
> early on when Brian started as a Stanford Prof, he had difficulty getting a
> use license from Unilogic even though he was the original author.
> That churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of
> LaTex to make Tex more accessible.
>

Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scribe specifically;
I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing books. I wonder what
the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all.

To bring it back to Unix, troff et al are obvious examples of the Unix
philosophy applied to document preparation, while TeX and its progeny have
always felt very foreign to me. They work, of course, but in a way that
feels discordant with respect to the aesthetic of the system. Of course,
TeX originated on the SAIL system, so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world
had different sensibilities than the Unix world. One wonders whether, if
Knuth had been working on a Unix machine instead of SAIL, whether TeX would
have been as chatty as it is; I suspect not.

        - Dan C.
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