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

George Michaelson ggm at algebras.org
Thu Feb 11 09:05:17 AEST 2021


I wonder if this was a university BSD/Bell licence vs "everyone else"
thing. I know we had ubiquitous use of nroff, troff and ditroff, in
succession at Leeds and York across 82-84 and onward. That was with a
benson-varian wet process printer from roll paper, cut marks thrown in
free.

because I'd used Tops-10 Runoff at uni, nroff made sense. The guys who
walked in other doors wound up tooled in TeX which I didn't {relax}
get.

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 8:37 AM Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> Greg A. Woods writes:
> >
> > 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.
>
> Maybe for you; I had it everywhere that I worked.


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