gbranden pushed a commit to branch master
in repository groff.
commit 6f6d40cc4d0548f53013f20c1446667ba6c6ab1f
Author: G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]>
AuthorDate: Tue Mar 29 00:23:57 2022 +1100
doc/groff.texi: Note significant historical point.
"One of the most amusing and unexpected consequences of phototypesetting
was the Unix standard error file (!). After phototypesetting, you had
to take a long wide strip of paper and feed it carefully into a smelly,
icky machine which eventually (several minutes later) spat out the paper
with the printing visible.
One afternoon several of us had the same experience -- typesetting
something, feeding the paper through the developer, only to find a
single, beautifully typeset line: "cannot open file foobar" The
grumbles were loud enough and in the presence of the right people, and a
couple of days later the standard error file was born..." -- Steven C.
Johnson
---
doc/groff.texi | 6 +++++-
1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/doc/groff.texi b/doc/groff.texi
index b816d814..d01abafe 100644
--- a/doc/groff.texi
+++ b/doc/groff.texi
@@ -884,7 +884,11 @@ streams, respectively. Diagnostic messages from the GNU
@code{troff}
formatter and other programs are examples of the latter, but the
formatter can also be directed to write user-specified messages to the
standard error stream. The notation then serves to distinguish the
-output stream and does not necessarily mean that an error has occurred.
+output stream and does not necessarily mean that an error has
+occurred.@footnote{Unix and related operating systems distinguish
+standard output and standard error streams @emph{because} of
+@code{troff}:@:
+@uref{https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2013-December/006113.html}.}
@Example
$ echo "Twelve o'clock and" | groff -Tascii | sed '/^$/d'
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