[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[arnold at skeeve.com]

You may be right. It seems to be shortly after the '78 release of V7.
For the full story on ditroff, see Brian's papers on it at
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html .  They are fascinating
(and fun!) reading.

Arnold

Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Thinking about this typesetter C may have been later with ditroff.  
>
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
>
> > On May 14, 2018, at 10:45 AM, Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 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