[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:03 AM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

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

Oh sure, but I didn't mean in the sense of code, but rather,
philosophically and design-wise. Both seem to be influenced by Scribe's
idea of separation of content and presentation (an idea reinvented a decade
later in HTML+CSS).

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).
>

There's some documentation available for both:
https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/History.html
Paraphrasing that document, MIT had a thing called Bolio which evolved into
BoTeX. Independently, Stallman created the "info" format (for ITS perhaps?)
and then BoTeX and Info merged to become texinfo, with the stated goal of
producing both online and printed representations from a single source
document. The earliest texinfo formatter was written in Emacs Lisp. BoTeX
seems to date from late 1984, but this doesn't put a date on the creation
of texinfo. It _does_ mention `makeinfo` in "the early 90s", so we may
assume sometime after 1984 and before 1992? `texinfo.el` from the Emacs
18.29 distribution has copyright dates from 1985, 1988, but it's hard to
make out the actual provenance of the source in those files (ie, was the
1985 date due to that file being copied from an earlier file created in
1985?).

It's somewhat harder to nail down the exact history of LaTeX; Lamport has
this: http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#latex which seems to
indicate that, while "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" was published
in 1986, he had been working on it for at least two or three years before
that. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-latex-interview.pdf
mentions that he started using TeX ca 1979, but doesn't mention when he
actually created LaTeX. He goes on to say that he was using a macro package
by Max Diaz and thought he could do better "when Don was creating
TeX80(?)". I'd guess that means this is in the 1980-81 timeframe? It goes
on to say that he moved to DEC in 1985 and never used *roff (I assume he at
least poked at it and take that to mean he was never a serious user).

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.
>

Info definitely came from that world. Texinfo as the marriage of BoTeX as a
Scribe-a-like and Info as an online help format seem less like a hack and
more deliberate.


> 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).
>

Which part was weird? The HP terminals?

It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what it does. That seemed perfectly
> natural to me when I started using it.
>

Or at least SAIL-y, but it seems like the PDP-10 systems had a lot of
cross-pollination between them, possibly due to the shared lineage from the
PDP-6 monitor and associated DEC tools like DDT?

        - Dan C.
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