[TUHS] CSTR files

[John Labovitz]

On Aug 25, 2017, at 2:27 PM, Chris Torek <torek at torek.net> wrote:

>> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources.
> 
> The *original* original (Unix) roff (not sure if there was
> a precursor elsewhere) was in pdp-11 assembly.

Last fall, I wrote an article for the American Printing History Association called 'The Electric Typesetter: The Origins of Computing in Typography.’ In doing research, I found the earliest succession of roff predecessors went something like this:

	TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff

TJ-2 is described at <http://www.dpbsmith.com/tj2.html>. I don’t have info on the other processors at hand at the moment.

Folks here might be interested in my article, but sadly the journal doesn’t tend to put their content online for quite a while. The TOC for the issue is at <https://printinghistory.org/publications/printing-history/ns/#21>.

—John