> Von: "Doug McIlroy" <d...@cs.dartmouth.edu> > > Thanks for the link info. I thought I knew just about all there > was to know about RUNOFF, but learned from the man page that it > had a much longer life than I was aware of. > > I'm pretty sure that the reason for all the arrangements for > upper-case representation was the input devices, not the > printers. By the time I used RUNOFF (1965) the preferred > input device was an IBM Selectric, hence the mention of > print balls, which were unique to that device. But CTSS > began with model 33 teletypes, which had upper case only. > I believe that IBM's train (or chain?) printers with a > full complement of characters had displaced the old tabulator > printers by 1963. Upper-case input was also necessary if you > happened to be stuck with punched cards; that motivation > though was more pertinent to my roff at Bell Labs than to > Saltzer's Runoff at MIT. > > I noticed one occurrence of CTTS in the man page.
Thank you for your interest. `mom' is much like `RUNOFF'. So `RUNOFF' is not dead. The 2-letter abbreviations of classical `roff' make the `roff' files unreadable. `RUNOFF' control words are much better. I sent a former version of my `RUNOFF' man-page to Saltzer. He agreed to the information there. At that time, I called the man-page `RUNOFF.man'. Unfortunately the Unix man-pages were only written in lower case. So I renamed it to `runoff.7'. But in Linux, there are some man-page files that are capitalized. I would prefer the man-page name `RUNOFF.7', because the original `RUNOFF' system was always written in upper case. Any complaints? Actually I found additional information. A document of 1974 is the best documentation so far, especially for the upper case text files. I will append that to the man-page `runoff.7'. The `RUNOFF' project started at CTTS. More hardware information will appended later on. I also found a CTTS emulator, which seems to be quite interesting. It was written by a friend of Saltzer. But I did not check it so far. Moreover the files related to `RUNOFF' in my github archive have to be expanded. Bernd
