Unix witticisms

[Ron Natalie]

tbl was a real hack.    It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as it was to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer.      Oddly, decades after I thought everbody (including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text formatters someone sends me a manual.    Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the vertical lines on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel too high.    "Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked.   Sure enough it was.