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

[Clem Cole]

Ron. That’s awesome.  Ferrin used the Same set of Hersey Font that the XGP
used.  He got them from Stanford as I recall but they were publically (aka
open source)

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 7:28 PM Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> We used nroff quite a bit with both the Model37 teletype (for which it
> wsa designed, ours even had the greek box on it) and with output filters
> for the lineprinter and the Diablos.
>
> Later on we drove troff into cat emulators that used Versatec printers.
>     I don’t knwo wher Berkely’s vcat got their fonts, but the JHU verset
> had an amusing history on that.
>
> George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out
> the fonts in large point size on film.    In the basement of the
> biophysics bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope which
> used a PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so)
> framebuffer.    George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad
> hooked them up to the X and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope.    Then he
> put a photomutlipler tube in a scope camera housing and hoked the sense
> wire from the microscope to that.
>
> He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner.   He’d tape
> one letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope
> sofware (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope.    Then
> without powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he’d boot up
> miniunix and copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack.
> After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT
> emulator.
>
> I had gone to work for Martin Marietta wirking on a classified project
> so I wrote hacks to the -mm macro package to handle security markings
> (automatically putting the highest on each page on thte top and bottom).
>     Later when ditroff became available I continued to use it with
> various laserprinters.    I even wrote macropackages to emulate IBM’s
> doc style when we were contracting with them.
>
> This was all to the chagrin of my boss who wanted us to switch to
> Framemaker.
>
>
>
> --
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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