[TUHS] Troff to ps

[Larry McVoy]

I was just an engineer but what John said sort of is what I thought.  There
was some money weirdness around anything above nroff/troff.  I don't think
it was $5 but as I said, I was an engineer, nobody directly told me this
stuff.

On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 08:25:33PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> Actually  It was very cheap. $5 a copy if I remember correctly   Masscomp
> and Stellar just ate the cost.  The adobe transcript license was also
> nominal.  In both cases we realized it was cheaper than trying to keep two
> separate streams and figure out which systems we shipped it too.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 7:26 PM John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> 
> > Greg A. Woods <woods at robohack.ca> wrote:
> > > As I recall even some of the bigger vendors such as Sun and IBM didn't
> > > offer ditroff in their base OS, but they did offer old troff.  Those
> > > were the days of insane AT&T licensing and all the games competitors
> > > played around it.
> >
> > As I recall, AT&T wanted about the same amount of money for ditroff as
> > for the entire UNIX release.  So, of course no UNIX vendor was going to
> > double the royalty they paid to AT&T for every customer, for a small
> > improvement in a utility that most customers didn't even use (troff).
> >
> >         John
> >
> > --
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

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