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Troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid- 1960s. (The name allegedly came from the phrase at the time, I'll run off a document.)
Bob Morris ported it to the GE 635 architecture and called the program roff (an abbreviation of runoff). It was rewritten as rf for the PDP-7, and at the same time ( 1969For other uses, see Number 1969. For the movie, see 1969 (movie). Events January January 1 Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch purchases the largest selling British Sunday newspaper The News Of The World January 5 The Derry Riots leave over 100 people i), Doug McIlroy rewrote an extended and simplified version of roff in the BCPLBCPL Basic Combined Programming Language is a computer programming language that was designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge ( 1966) as a response to difficulties with its predecessor CPL during the 1960s. The first compiler implementat programming languageAn alternate rewrite has been has been. Please refer to it for large rewrites. A programming language or computer language is a standardized communication technique for expressing instructions to a computer. It is a set of syntactic and semantic rules use.The first version of Unix was developed on a PDP-7 which was sitting around Bell LabsBell Telephone Laboratories or Bell Labs was originally the research and development arm of the United States Bell System, and was the premier corporate facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies from telephone switches to spec. In 19711971 is a common year starting on Friday (click for link to calendar). Events January January 1 British divorce Reform Act comes into force January 2 66 die in stairway crush at Rangers v Celtic football match, Glasgow, Scotland. See Ibrox disaster. Janua the developers wanted to get a PDP-11The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. in the 1970s and 1980s. The PDP-11 was a successor to DEC's PDP-8 computer in the PDP series of computers. It had several uniquely innovative features, and was easier to program because for further work on the operating system. In order to justify the cost for this system, they proposed that they would implement a document formatting system for the AT&T patents division. This first formatting program was a reimplementation of McIllroy's roff, written by Joe F. Ossanna.
When they needed a more flexible language, a new version of roff called nroff (Newer 'roff') was written. It had a much more complicated syntax, but provided the basis for all future versions. When they got a Graphic Systems CAT Phototypesetter, Ossanna wrote a version of nroff that would drive it. It was dubbed troff, for typesetter 'roff', although many people have speculated that it actually means Times 'roff' because of the use of the Times Roman font family in troff by default. As such, the name troff is pronounced t-roff rather than trough.
With troff came nroff (they were actually almost the same program), which was for producing output for line printers and character terminals. It understood everything troff did, and ignored the commands which were not applicable (e.g. font changes).
Unfortunately, Ossanna's troff was written in PDP-11 assembly language and produced output specifically for the CAT phototypesetter . He rewrote it in C, although it was now 7000 lines of uncommented code and still dependent on the CAT. As the CAT became less common, and was no longer supported by the manufacturer, the need to make it support other devices became a priority. However, before this could be done, Ossanna was killed in an auto accident.
So, Brian Kernighan took on the task of rewriting troff. The newly rewritten version produced a device independent code which was very easy for postprocessors to read and translate to the appropriate printer codes. Also, this new version of troff (called ditroff for device independent 'troff') had several extensions, which included drawing functions.
The troff collection of tools was eventually called Documenter's WorkBench ( DWB), and was under continuous development in Bell Labs (renamed Unix System Laboratories , USL) through 1994. At that time, SoftQuad took over the maintenance, although Brian Kernighan continued to improve troff on his own. There is thus currently three variants of the original Bell Labs troff:
Use of troff and family was reduced somewhat in the 1990s, but it is still being used quite extensively. While Troff has been supplanted by other programs such as Interleaf, FrameMaker and LaTeX, it is still the default format of the UNIX documentation