[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976))

[Clem Cole]

ᐧ

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 3:49 PM Greg A. Woods <woods at robohack.ca> wrote:

> At Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:54:37 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)
> >
> > yes ... but ... even UNIX binary folks had troff licenses and many/most
> at
> > ditroff licenses.
>
> I would like to try once again to dispell the apparent myth that troff
> was readily available to Unix users in wider circles.
>
Hard to call it a myth - it was quite available.  In fact, I never used a
single mainstream UNIX system from DEC, IBM, HP later Sun, Masscomp, Apollo
that did not have it, and many if not all small systems did also.

>
> True, old troff might have been there in the distribution, but not
> necessarily as many vendors didn't include it even though they had the
> license since they knew most users didn't care about it, and of course
> the users didn't care about troff because _nobody_ had a C/A/T,

Yes, but after Tom Ferrin created vcat(1) in the late 1970s ('77 I think,
but I've forgotten).   Many people did have access to a plotter which cost
about $1k in the late 1970s,  or even later a 'wet' laser printer like the
Imagen which cost about $5K a few years later.

(and hardly anyone cared to use nroff to format things for line printers).
>
No offense, but that's just not true. Line printers and nroff were used a
great deal to prep things, and often UNIX folks had access to a daisy shell
printer for higher quality nroff output, much less using the line printer.



> People would install Wordstar long before they even thought about using
> nroff.
>
I did not know anyone that did that.   But I'll take your word for it.
Wordstar as I recall ran on 8-bit PCs.   The only two people I knew that
had larger CP/M systems back in the day that might have supported that were
Phil Karn (*a.k.a.* KA9Q of TCP/IP for CP/M fame) and Guy Soytomayer - both
were sometimes lab partners.  But all three of us had access to the XGP in
CMU CS dept, using Scribe on the PDP-10s, but we all used nroff most of the
time because we had more cycles available on the UNIX boxes and the 10s
required going to the terminal room.   FWIW: my non-techie CMU course
professors used to let you turning papers printed off the line printer and
people used anything they had - which was Scribe on the 20s and nroff on
the Unix, boxes and I've forgotten the name of the program that ran on the
TSS, which the business majors like my roommate tended to use.


>
> Ditroff (or sqtroff) was also incredibly rare to non-existent for 99% of
> the Unix sites I worked at and visited; even some time after it became
> available.  Even sites running native AT&T Unix, e.g. on 3B2s, and thus
> could easily obtain it, often didn't want the added expense of
> installing it.
>
The only time I had a deal with pure AT&T systems was occasionally at the
AT&T, but even there most of them that I worked, had BSD or Research, based
systems.   The only 3B2 I ever saw was the one we were forced to buy by
AT&T to get a System V source license at Stellar as the reference system,
when PDP-11 and Vaxen stopped being the default.   We did get ditroff from
the toolchest for it, since we were including it in the base Stellar
system.  The Apple Laserwriter was fully in the wild with transcript by
then, so vcat was not needed.


>
> So, old troff was basically a total useless waste of disk space until
> psroff came along.
>
Sounds like you never had access to a plotter.

>
> Psroff made troff useful,

psroff was very, very late in the UNIX development.   vcat was nearly 10
years earlier, and psroff only showed up after the Apple Laserwriter which
is what - early 1985 I think.  But Versatec and the like plotter were all
over the place, much less daisy wheel printers.  True, the Hersey fonts
were not nearly as nice as PostScript and the resolution was only 200 dpi
(and it was a wet process) but most UNIX sites, particularly if you had
invested in Vaxen had them.



> but IF And Only IF you had a C compiler _and_
> the skill to install it.  That combination was still incredibly rare.

Excuse me...   most end-users sites had them.   Sun was the only one of the
majors that did not ship a C compiler with the system by default.  And as
Larry has pointed out, even that was fixed by rms fairly soon afterward.
But all of the suppliers of the majors UNIX implementations knew that you
got the C compiler with UNIX.   Jacks to open -- just include it.

It sounds like your early UNIX experiences were in a limited version, which
is a little sad and I can see that might color your thinking.



>   A C compiler was often the biggest impediment to many sites I worked at
> --
> they didn't have programmers and they didn't want to shell out even cash
> more for any programming tools (even though they had often hired me as a
> consulting programmer to "fix their Unix system"!).
>
Yeech... sorry to hear that.



> In circles I travelled through if one wanted true computer typesetting
> support it was _far_ easier and better (even after Groff came along)

Hmmm ...  you were complaining you need a C compiler for ditroff, yet groff
needs C++ IIRC.?



> to install TeX, even if it meant hiring a consultant to do it, since that
>
Which means you need a Pascal compiler BTW .... and Tex was written using
the PDP-10 Pascal extensions, so you had to have a Pascal that understood
that.  Which was often not easy, particularly on UNIX boxes.  The UCB
Pascal != PDP-10 Pascal.


> meant having far wider printer support (though realistically PostScript
> printers were the only viable solution at some point, e.g. especially
> after laser printers became available, i.e. outside Xerox and IBM shops).
>
My guess this observation is because HP was late to the Postscript world
and there while the eventual hpcat(1) was done for the vaxen and made it
the USENET, it was fairly late in time, and I'm not sure if anyone at HP or
anyone else ever wrote a ditroff backend for HP's PCL.

The key is that Apple Laserwriters were pretty cheap and since they already
did PS, most sites I knew just bought PS based ones and did not go HP until
later when PS was built-in.



> I was quite a fan of, and an extreme expert in using, troff and tbl.
>
Good to hear.


> However once I discovered Lout I dropped troff like a hot potato.
>
Never used it, but I'll take your word for it.  I believe it is very Scribe
like and looking at it you can see in the influence.
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