[TUHS] FD 2

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-01-23T00:32:53-0800, James Johnston wrote:
> At one point it was like $22/page.
> 
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2023 at 11:30 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
> 
> > Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> >
> > > And I believe that the impetus for the V7 changes was
> > > phototypesetting 'file not found' too often...  But that last bit
> > > is mostly because I want to believe.
> >
> > Doug McIlroy has told that story here, search the archives.
> > It was indeed becase of the phototypesetter.

Steve Johnson's email[0] (which I cited in my earlier reply to this
thread) said it took only "a couple of days" after acquistion of the
phototypesetter for this to happen.  But the C/A/T was acquired by
1973[1], and the Hunt Brothers' cornering of the silver market occurred
in March 1980[2], over a year _after_ the release of V7[3].

It seems both of these can't be true.  I wondered if maybe only a later
typesetter used a silver-based photochemical development process, but
that doesn't work with troff history either, as device-independent troff
wasn't ready to go until about January 1981, targetting the C/A/T and
the Autologic APS-5[4], the latter with support so fresh that it wasn't
in the manual yet[5].

Can someone reconcile these points?

Regards,
Branden

[0] https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2013-December/006113.html
[1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man1/troff.1
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
[3] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7
[4] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/Unix_4.0/Volume_1/00_Annotated_Table_of_Contents.pdf
    (p. 2)
[5] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/Unix_4.0/Volume_1/C.1.2_NROFF_TROFF_Users_Manual.pdf
    (p. 34)
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