[pups] RE: AT&T Unix Operating System for Writers Workbench Softw are?

[Kevin Schoedel]

On 2000/07/11 at 10:21am +1000, Grant Maizels
<grant.maizels at cogita.com.au> wrote:
>Writers Work Bench was an extension to the basic troff/nroff tools developed
>earlier, but took new directions. It included a whole lot of new programs
>like diction (a grammar checker??) which were more to do with the content
>than the formatting. I think that pic was developed separately by bwk for a
>research version. I have never used WWB but I have some documentation on it
>somewhere at home. I believe that it was sold with source as an add on for
>various Unicies.

I have a little documentation here, mostly three papers from BSTJ vol. 62
no. 6, July/August 1983. It did contain -- as the makefile says --
'diction' (basically a search for 'bad' phrases), 'style' (which
generated readabilty and other statistics for text), 'punct' (a basic
punctuation checker), and a handful of other similar programs.

Importantly for the PUPS archive, I'm pretty certain that AT&T retained
ownership of WWB when it sold UNIX, so it wouldn't be covered by the SCO
license. I have no idea who owns it now.

'pic', along with troff and such, was in *Documenter's* Workbench.

-- 
Kevin Schoedel
schoedel at kw.igs.net