[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Clem cole]

Runoff from other systems begat Unix roff.   Which begat new roff - aka  nroff.  both assume an ASR 37 as the output device.  When the first typesetter was procured typesetter roff aka troff, was born which assumes the C/A/T as the output device (which is a binary format).    This is also were typesetter C comes from.   Note these are 3 separate and different programs although nroff and troff mostly take the same input language.  These were included in V5/6/7 IIRC 



When newer typesetters were obtained and after the death of troff’s author,  Brian rewrote the nroff/troff package to create ditroff- device independent typesetter roff which also could support ASCII output nroff style

This version was released independently of the OS and took a separate license.   

Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create today’s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On May 14, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 14 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> 
>> Here's part of the story.
> 
> [...]
> 
> You mentioned "nroff" a few times; would it not have been "troff" for their C/A/T photo-typesetter?  At least, that was the lore that I heard...
> 
> And what was "C/A/T" anyway (assuming that my memory is not failing me)?
> 
> -- Dave