[TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna

[Larry McVoy]

I'll say this every time his name comes up, it's one of the great regrets
of my life that I did not get to meet this guy.  I think troff is genius,
you can ask me why and I'll tell you, don't want to bore the list with
a ton of arcane, but useful if you care about it, stuff.  Troff was 
amazing, just look at what was built on it, eqn, pic, tbl, and more.

I so wish I could have met this guy and told him how much his work meant
to me.  I've used troff for everything, I have a perl script that took
troff -ms input and produced a web site.  I ran a company for 18 years,
our logo was done in troff.  I ran a conference that did most of the
papers in LaTex and I encouraged troff and the people who use troff came
to me and said "this was so much easier than LaTex".  Yep.

So he may not have the fame that Ken and Brian and Dennis and Doug and
others have but he's one of my heros.  Along with all of them and other
Bell Labs folks.

RIP Joseph Ossanna, you are missed.  I wish I had met you.

On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 07:53:54AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> We lost J.F. Ossanna on this day in 1977; he had a hand in developing Unix,
> and was responsible for "roff" and its descendants.  Remember him, the next
> time you see "jfo" in Unix documentation.
> 
> He also accomplished a lot more, too much to summarise here.
> 
> -- Dave

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm