The man page roff(7) incorrectly attributes roff to Joe Ossanna. Ossanna wrote nroff and troff, but roff preceded that work. The name roff was first used to distinguish a rewrite for Multics from the original runoff, probably because both were maintained on CTSS. I wrote an extended roff in BCPL for GECOS and kept the Multics name. Ken and/or Dennis rewrote the BCPL program in assembly language for Unix. There never was a pure runoff for Unix.
Doug
