[TUHS] History of man pages

[Larry McVoy]

I still use it, BitMover's MLA (signed by the likes of Intel, Cisco,
IBM, HP, etc) is maintained in troff.  And one of those companies,
not to be named, shoved it into word (in fact they all did that part),
turned on track changes, made some typo like fixes, turned off track
changes, and changed some major stuff.  I took the word doc, extracted
to text, ran it through my formatter and diffed 'em and found the
unwanted changes.  Said company proceeded to be shocked!  shocked!
shocked, I tell you!  Shocked!  that this had happened and it must
have been a huge mistake!

Go roff.  Or go diff.  Or something :)

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 08:04:09AM -0500, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Gosh, I'd forgotten about that.    "Roff is the simplest of the text formatting programs but is utterly frozen."
> They finally dragged me off troff in the mid-90's.
> 
> 
> On Jan 30, 2012, at 8:53 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 12:36:31PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> >> I've received a link http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html claiming to
> >> be about man pages; in fact, it's a lot more than that, including the
> >> prehistory of troff.  Interesting stuff.
> >> 
> >> Greg
> > 
> > Thanks Greg, yes a good read. Pity we've lost the PDP-11 asm
> > version of roff from 1st/2nd Edition Unix.
> > 	Warren
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Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com