[TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history

[Tom Lyon]

Most of y'all are aware of Brian Kernighan's troff involvement. My
understanding is that he pretty much took over nroff/troff after Joe Ossana
died, and came out with ditroff.

But Brian had much earlier involvement with non-UNIX *roff.  When he was
pursuing his PhD at Princeton, he spent a summer at MIT using CTSS and
RUNOFF.  When he came back to P'ton, he wrote a ROFF for the IBM 7094,
later translated to the IBM 360.  Many generations of students, myself
included, use the IBM ROFF (batch, not interactive) as a much friendlier
alternative to dumb typewriters.  I don't know if 360 ROFF spread beyond
Princeton, but I wouldn't be surprised.

BTW, during my summer at Bell, nroff/troff was one of the few programs I
could not port to the Interdata 8/32 - it was just a mess of essentially
typeless code.  I don't think Joe Ossana got around to it either before he
died.

-- 
- Tom
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