[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 8:36 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

You can best view them as -ms vs -me. Two different sets of macros to
markup the text with semantic information that's then turned into useful
rendering by a variety of ways. texinfo and latex are completely unrelated
at a code level. LaTeX predates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it
up, but I encountered LaTeX years before texinfo, though it's possible I
just ignored it when working on bringing up GNU Emacs on VMS 5.mumble back
in the day). It was always my impression that texinfo came more from the
ITS info file world and that the TeX bits were initially just a hack
because it was also on those machines...  It would be interesting to hear
from people that were there.


> 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.
>

Likely not. It was only slightly odd to me because our school moved from
TOPS-20 to SunOS and 4.{2,3}BSD (maybe others, don't know when the VAX was
delivered: it was just there when I arrived with a boatload of HP terminals
attached to it which I thought odd). It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what
it does. That seemed perfectly natural to me when I started using it.

Warner
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