[TUHS] Troff to ps

[Norman Wilson]

Nemu Nusquam:

  When was dpost born?

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CSTR 97, A Typesetter-Independent TROFF by Brian W Kernighan
was issued in 1981 and revised the next year.  So that's the
earliest possible date.

I vaguely remember the existence of Postscript support in
general, including at least one Apple Laserwriter kicking
around somewhere, starting at some point during my time at
1127 in the latter 1980s.  There was even a Postscript
display engine that ran on 5620 terminals under mux, though
it wasn't normally used for troff previewing because the
troff-specific proofer was faster (mainly, I think, it
didn't send nearly as much data down the serial line to
the terminal).

My personal snapshot of V10, and the TUHS archive copy,
include dpost; see src/cmd/postscript/dpost.  Everything
in the postscript directory came from USG, who had
packaged everything troff into a separately-licensed
Documenter's Workbench package.  That may have made us
exclude it from the officially-distributed V8 tape and
V9 snapshots.  In any case, the only V9 snapshot I know
of offhand (which is in Warren's archive) has no dpost.

Both my copy of V10 and the TUHS copy show dpost's
source files with dates in 1991, but it was certainly
there earlier if I used it in New Jersey (I left in
mid-1990).  Dpost is documented in man8/postscript.8;
my copy of that file is dated October 1989.

Digging around in documents available on the web,
I found a bundle of DWB 2.0 docs:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/Documentors_Workbench_1989/UNIX_System_V_Documentors_Workbench_Reference_Manual_1989.pdf

It's a scanned-image PDF so I can't search it by
machine, but it includes such things as listings of
the source-code directory and manifests of various
binary distributions, and dpost doesn't appear anywhere
I can see.  As the URL implies, the docs seem to
be dated 1989.  So maybe dpost wasn't part of the
product until DWB 3.0; but maybe we in Research got
an early copy of the postscript stuff (I think bwk
was in regular communication with the USG-troff
folks), perhaps in 1989.

I confess I've lost track of the original question
that spawned this thread, but if it is whether
dpost is easily back-ported to PDP-11 UNIX, I don't
think that's likely without a good bit of work.
It would very likely require a post-1980-type C
compiler, since it was written in the late 1980s.
It might or might not fit on a PDP-11; I don't
remember whether USG's system still officially
ran there by the late 1980s.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON