[TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Sat Jan 15 00:08:55 AEST 2022


On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 11:13:35AM +0100, Jaap Akkerhuis 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".

TIT vs DIT might be why?


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