One thing that does not seem to have been mentioned so far (or perhaps I have overlooked it) is the role of roff (abbreviation of "runoff", to reduce key-strokes) in the emergence of Unix itself.
Unix was not originally developed by Bell Labs (as a corporation) but by a group of Bell Labs people working "on the side" to develop a simpler and better version of the Bell Labs operating system Multics. These included Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. When they finally got it working, Bell Labs was not interested in adopting it. So, happily inspired, they developed the text-formatter runoff (--> roff) on Unix, and then demonstrated to Bell Labs how good it was at formatting structured documents -- in particular legal documents. At this point Bell Labs woke up, and adopted Unix! Without roff, Unix might well have disappeared. I think man-pages came later (now that roff could easily format their structured layout). Best wishes to all, Ted. PS: Unix of course teems with abbreviations, such as "roff" for "runoff", "ls" for "list", "mv" for "move", etc., including "man" for "manual". This provides many opportunities for interesting experiments with language. So, if you are using a Unix/Linux system with standard man-pages, on a command-line terminal enter: man sex and see what you get! On Sun, 2018-12-02 at 11:36 -0500, Yves Cloutier wrote: > Hi Dave, thanks for this link! > > On Sat, Dec 1, 2018 at 7:27 AM Dave Bucklin <dave.buck...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I just came across this on Reddit. It seems relevant. > > > > http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html > >
