Follow-up Comment #6, bug #65101 (group groff): Earlier in the discussion, I said:
> To be honest, I'm not sure Ossanna troff was ever ported to the VAX, so I'm not sure what the CSRG used to set their manuals. It most certainly was, as part of Unix/32V. Reiser and London of AT&T documented this effort in their paper "A UNIX(TM) Operating System for the DEC VAX-11/780 Computer". https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/32vscan.pdf They even singled out _troff_ for complaint, though they didn't savage it as badly as they did the Bourne shell. "The source code for the document preparation and phototypesetter commands is not portable; several weeks were required to produce properly running version [sic] of these commands. Use of the explicit (or worse, implicit) constant "2" instead of sizeof(int) was quite common. The code assumes that variables which [recte: that] are adjacent in external declarations occupy contiguous memory at execution time. Several tables are initialized by assembly-language programs. Converting the tables was merely tedious; changing the code which [recte: that] thought it knew the format of an a.out file required some effort. This memorandum was created using the converted nroff/troff programs on the VAX-11/780." I had read that paper before but apparently managed to forget much of its content. I hope that keying this in will help me to be a better *roff historian in the future. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65101> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
