> My own research undertaken for updating Larry Kollar's ms.ms suggests
> that there were several revisions of Lesk's ms manual.
I was there at the time; mid-1970s.
Michael Lesk's ms came out of the Bell Labs research area where UNIX was
invented and refined. The target audience was the folk inside the research
community and writing for journal publication.
The mm macros came from the Programmer's Workbench area where the focus was
on the Bell Labs general population using PWB to write for Bell Labs internal
publication. A lot of work went into making the output meet the writing
standards of that time.
From
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.54.3797&rep=rep1&type=pdf
A TROFF Tutorial
Brian W. Kernighan
For producing straight text (which may well
contain mathematics or tables), there are a number of
‘macro packages’ that define formatting rules and
operations for specific styles of documents, and
reduce the amount of direct contact with troff. In
particular, the ‘–ms’ [4] and PWB/MM [5] packages
for Bell Labs internal memoranda and external papers
provide most of the facilities needed for a wide range
of document preparation. (This memo was prepared
with ‘–ms’.) There are also packages for viewgraphs,
for simulating the older roff formatters on UNIX and
GCOS, and for other special applications. Typically
you will find these packages easier to use than troff
once you get beyond the most trivial operations; you
should always consider them first.
[4] M. E. Lesk, Typing Documents on UNIX, Bell Laboratories, 1978.
[5] J. R. Mashey and D. W. Smith, PWB/MM — Programmer’s Workbench
Memorandum Macros, Bell Laboratories internal memorandum
--
Mike Bianchi
mbian...@foveal.com
