[TUHS] Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
I did know someone, twice, My dad and grandfather. For many years the
family business was typesetting. First they ran a business based on
hotmetal typography. They used the same methods that the Linotype
presented. Eventually Dad switched to photo. He ran two shops, based
on the L202 machine from the same company as the original one. One
year he tells me about having an interesting job, doing the annual
report for AT&T, because the one that the company had there, couldn't
properly grok the ideas behind it, it wasn't until I got into
programming that I figured it out, because the C book was, ah, done
locally and that way.

Ironically the font the company uses for its logo and much of its work
was cut for them, it was called AT&T Gothic.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature was present when the impossible happened 23 years ago, twice."

On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 12:22 AM G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At 2024-09-28T19:20:07-0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > That CSTR number 1 is nicely formatted, is that troff?
>
> troff didn't exist yet in 1971.
>
> That is proper typesetting, though.  I don't know enough to say if it's
> phototypeset or hot lead (can the naked eye reliably tell, if both
> techniques are of high quality?).  We could take the question to the
> real typographers on the groff list.
>
> roff(7):
>      Third Edition Unix also brought the pipe(2) system call, the
>      explosive growth of a componentized system based around it, and a
>      “filter model” that remains perceptible today.  Equally
>      importantly, the Bell Labs site in Murray Hill acquired a Graphic
>      Systems C/A/T phototypesetter, and with it came the necessity of
>      expanding the capabilities of a roff system to cope with a variety
>      of proportionally spaced typefaces at multiple sizes.  Ossanna
>      wrote a parallel implementation of nroff for the C/A/T, dubbing it
>      troff (for “typesetter roff”).  Unfortunately, surviving
>      documentation does not illustrate what requests were implemented at
>      this time for C/A/T support; the troff(1) man page in Fourth
>      Edition Unix (November 1973) does not feature a request list,
>      unlike nroff(1).  Apart from typesetter‐driven features, Unix
>      Version 4 roffs added string definitions (.ds); made the escape
>      character configurable (.ec); and enabled the user to write
>      diagnostics to the standard error stream (.tm).  Around 1974,
>      empowered with multiple type sizes, italics, and a symbol font
>      specially commissioned by Bell Labs from Graphic Systems, Kernighan
>      and Lorinda Cherry implemented eqn for typesetting mathematics.  In
>      the same year, for Fifth Edition Unix, Ossanna combined and
>      reimplemented the two roffs in C, using that language’s
>      preprocessor to generate both from a single source tree.
>
> Regards,
> Branden