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 <d...@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: From: Doug McIlroy <d...@cs.dartmouth.edu> Subject: [Groff] antiquity of troff To: groff@gnu.org 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.
