> Jerry Saltzer's RUNOFF (1964) did not have a .tr request, [...] > By AT&T Version 3 UNIX (1973), nroff(1) did have it, [...]
Doug McIlroy's GECOS runoff had it (the memo from 1969 even mentions its utility in creating unpaddable spaces), so I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that this feature had also been adopted in Unix nroff from the beginning. > so it's not clear to me whether unix v1 roff(1) already > supported the .tr request. But even if it did, that > would not have helped: programmable macros only appeared > in nroff(1), in 1972, at least a year after the v1 manual > pages were completed - let alone begun. I see. So while the v3 nroff manual page already mentions macros (and the .tr request), the manual page itself was still written using raw nroff requests. For v4 the manpages *were* rewritten to use macros (so it's not like editing all the manpages was considered too much work at the time), but auto-capitalization for section headers was not considered -- or perhaps it was considered but consciously rejected because situations existed where it would be detrimental?
