Re: [Groff] antiquity of troff

[Meg McRoberts]

When I started at Bell Labs in 1983, we had nroff/mmx and then there
was troff that was only for typesetting.  We wrote all the docs in nroff
then used troff to format this text for a typesetter and made any
necessary formatting changes on bluelines.

Pretty soon after that, we got device-independent troff, which was a
BIG DEAL!  That enabled us to format documents with variable-width
characters and different fonts on just a regular printer, although it
really was not nearly as "device independent" as what we have now.

Does anyone know the history of mmx?  When I started, mmx was the
command we used to produce formatted ASCII text from source that
used the *roff macros.  I got the idea that it was an older tool which
was being linked to nroff at about that time...

--- On Tue, 6/1/10, Doug McIlroy <address@hidden> wrote:

From: Doug McIlroy <address@hidden>
Subject: [Groff] antiquity of troff
To: address@hidden
Date: Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 7:24 AM

> troff pre-dates C by quite a while

Actually not.  C and nroff were contemporary--both debuted in 2nd edition Unix.
troff came in the 3rd edition.  Of course nroff was preceded by roff, and
that by runoff; but neither of those had a | operator, which was the
triggering question.  Certainly by the time | for absolute page coordinates
appeared in nroff/troff, C was well known to all involved.

roff, the original of which I wrote, did not have expressions, though
it did support constructions like .ps +2 to increment and decrement
parameters.