Re: DocLang

Dan Cross <[email protected]> wrote:
>Early Unix roff was a cousin of DEC's Runoff; more immediately,
>it is a descendent of McIlroy's BCPL roff[*] on Multics, which
>in turn descends from Saltzer's RUNOFF on CTSS.

Yes, and note that RUNOFF got ported to all kinds of other systems from
OS/360 to CDC NOS.  So a lot of people learned about the whole concept of
text processing from RUNOFF and then went on to build much better systems.

>DEC's version was inspired by the versions on CTSS and Multics
>(and apparently GENIE?), but is an independent implementation.

Yes, DSR (Digital Standard Runoff) was a bit weird but had features added
that were well-adapted to printing out DEC manuals instead of academic papers.

>Unix roff became nroff ("new roff"), and `troff` adapted it for
>use with a phototypesetter ("typesetter roff", hence "troff").

Yes.  

Meanwhile the guys at MIT were all using Scribe by 1980, and there were 
plenty of commercial systems out there for typesetting which were more
sophisticated but has a higher bar to entry, like INTERPRESS and the
previously mentioned XICS.  IBM had ISIL/GML with a more fancy markup
front end on top of that.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."