[TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history

[Rob Pike]

It was definitely Dennis, at least for the cleanup part I was referring to.

-rob


On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 9:14 PM Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jan 14, 2022, at 1:10, Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dennis spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the troff code in the late
> 1980s, if I remember right, moving it to modern C. He got annoyed by it one
> day.
>
> If I remember correctly, it was actually Ken.  He also turned it
> in a single binary.  (Troff -N turned it into nroff).
>
> > It was the "ditroff" variant although honestly I don't remember us ever
> calling it that. It was just the current version of troff. Not sure where
> the name came from. Perhaps it was us but I think of it as a foreign name.
>
> Originally Brian called it "Typesetter Independent Troff" in the
> article he wrote about it and for some reason people started to
> call it "Device Independent".
>
>         jaap
>
>
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