[TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Clem,

Once again, you have the timeline wrong on all this. The ditroff work
was started in the summer of 1979, well after V6, Typesetter C and
V7.  Details are available at https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/202paper.pdf
and https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pdf.

Perhaps Doug can set the history straight on troff. Here is my understanding,
corrections (from Doug) welcome:

- Ossanna wrote the original nroff in assembly language
- He rewrote it in C when the C/A/T was acquired
  At that time nroff/troff were built from mostly the same sources (as
  can be seen in the archives).

Thanks,

Arnold

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> After Joe died and the BTL crew got a new APS5 typesetter, Brian set out to
> rewrite the code base to support any typesetting by using traditional
> compiler technology of converting the input to an ASCII representation that
> is walked by a seperate program that generates the device specific output.
> In fact it was this work (original done on V6) that forced Dennis (and I
> assume Steve Johnson) to update the C language a bit - which is what is
> described in K&R1.  Brian's code and a version of DMR's updated C compiler
> was released independently as a package - hence the term 'typesetter C.'
>  This compiler and the new document system took a seperate license.   I had
> it at both CMU in the 70s and Tektronix -- I think Steve Glaser had it at
> Rice also - again ask someone else for other sites, including some of the
> early European ones.
>
> Later Brian's work was updated after V7 and included some new tools, and
> became known as Writer's Workbench, which eventually was entered in the
> 'toolchest.'
>
> At the time of the first release Brian published a paper / TR that
> describes the new version of troff (a.ka. ditroff), including some level of
> documentation for the intermediate language.  That was published and would
> have been officially available to James.