[TUHS] Fun with early troff.

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 4:43 PM, Kurt H Maier <khm at sciops.net> wrote:

> On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 04:14:54PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> >
> > For example, there is a NATO-standard "10-line" message
>
> When did they add the 10th line?  What is in it?  I was trained on the
> 9-line during my service, and I'd be fascinated to know what extra info
> was judged important enough to update the manuals.


Oh man. I had to go look it up and I found a copy on some website at
Lejeune and another one at training command. It looks like the NATO
standard *9* line request plus a line for patient information (name,
initials, last4, etc). Odd considering that if you've got multiple patients
you'd need more than one "line". Anyway, there's a copy in this document:
http://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/THULS.pdf (search for
"CASEVAC").

>
> > Yup. Troff. I took it to war.
> >
>
> It's been well over a decade, but there were QRF bases in Kabul whose
> security manuals and operation maps were generated onsite in TeX on my
> ancient Thinkpad.  I suspect, however, an academic study of combat-zone
> typesetting would be dominated by the inevitability of Powerpoint.


Neat. What branch were you?

I used to get super-annoyed when higher would muck with my manifests which
were, of course, Excel documents. "How do you know these total numbers are
correct?" "Because that cell is a formula that is the sum of all the other
relevant cells and unless you think that Microsoft can't ADD then there's
no reason for it to be incorrect. Please tell Lance Corporal Schmuckatelli
to stop overwriting my shit because he definitely can't add. Oh, and he
should probably get counseled to go take, 'Math for Marines' again; this
time without cheating and copying the answers out of the back fo the MCI."

I've often noticed the battlefield is ruled by Windows (e.g. those
> pilots were probably poking at Falconview)


Those helo pilots were just sitting on chairs eating potato chips in an
otherwise empty shipping container out at MOUTown and making things up as
they went along.

while the research side is
> extremely tied to unix and its ilk.  Obviously BRLCAD and other ARL
> involvement here, and just about all of of the DoD HPC program skews
> toward unix and linux.


Funny, the BFT in my M-ATV ran Linux. I got the guys down at the
maintenance depot to give me login name and password for their account so I
could play solitaire when nothing was going on.

        - Dan C.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180508/fc3722f6/attachment.html>