www.troff.org/history.html
The History of troff Home The history of troff The history of troff Troff was originally written by the late Joe Ossanna in about 1973, in assembly language for the PDP-11, to drive the Graphic Systems CAT typesetter. It was rewritten in C around 1975, and underwent slow but steady evolution until Ossannas death late in 1977. In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it would produce output for a variety of typesetters, while retaining its input specifications. Over the decade from 1979 to 1989, the internals have been modestly revised, though much of the code remains as it was when Ossanna wrote it.
Ritchie rewrote that as rf for the PDP-7, before there was UNIX it was an evolutionary dead end. At the same time, the summer of 1969, Doug McIlroy rewrote roff in BCPL Basic Combined Programming Language by Martin Richards , 1966, extending and simplifying it at the same time. It was McIlroys version that first Joe Ossanna and, after his death, Brian Kernighan turned into the troff we still use. Nearly a decade later, Ted Dolotta created the memorandum -mm macros, with a lot of input from John Mashey.
Even better, he sold me his California UNIX license plate when he moved back to NJ. Also, -mm was preceded by Mike Lesks -ms macros, which also got wide use. We did -mm because we had a bunch of additional format requirements, and we couldnt figure out how to extend -ms. Specifically: 1 We had several existing format specs which were not Bell Labs TMs or MFs that had to be matched to help a massive conversion of BTL typing pools.
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