[TUHS] troff, Gremlin terminals, and the grn preprocessor

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to clear up a historical matter.

In reviewing groff's "LICENSES" file, I find myself stuck on the
following paragraph.

>grn, written by Barry Roitblat <barry at rentonww.com> and David
>Slattengren <slatteng at Xinet.COM>, was part of the Berkeley
>troff distribution.  The files contain no AT&T code
>and are in the public domain.  Historically, the original package could
>be found at <http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/misc/grn.tar.Z>.

I'm not sure about that reference to "Berkeley troff".  I already
deleted the modifier "device-independent" from that sentence because
I've never seen even a whisper of evidence that the CSRG ever
distributed Kernighan's device-independent troff; that was locked up
behind AT&T's revenue-seeking aims.

But also, I can't find evidence that "grn" was distributed by Berkeley
at all.  At Warren's "Unix Tree",[1] I see what looks superficially like
evidence of support for Gremlin terminals in "libplot", but that's not
the same thing.

However there is evidence of support for grn, the troff preprocessor, in
other unquestionable BSD artifacts, like Eric Allman's "me" package.

Can someone clear up my misconceptions or suggest non-misleading
alternative wording?

Was the grn preprocessor one of these "USENIX tape" things, like nethack
and jove?

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl
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