Hi (warning: off-topic morning coffee-time message),
Recently, while working on mandoc goodies, it seemed that the many
Internet accounts of UNIX manpage history were at times inconsistent
with roff.7:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/share/man/man7/roff.7
This resulted in some detective-work to find primary sources. I figure
maybe a few others here might be interested in the results:
http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html
...Some fun trivia (yes, this is fun--you just don't realise it yet):
- The grand-father of roff is RUNOFF, written in 1964 by J. Saltzer in
the MAD language. Saltzer used RUNOFF to format his MIT doctoral thesis
proposal. (Inspired by RUNOFF, B. Kernighan wrote his own port for his
doctoral thesis at Princeton in 1969. In Fortran! Wait... you didn't
write your own formatter for your thesis?)
- Most imagine that the first UNIX roff(1) was in C. It wasn't: it
was in PDP-11 assembly, written by D. Ritchie. Even then, in 1971,
RUNOFF had already been re-written in BCPL, PDP-7 assembly, Fortran,
CP67/CMS, and GE-635 assembly (the last is speculative).
- In '91, H. Spencer wrote an roff interpreter in AWK. Say again:
AWK. Damn.
- Our modern manual sections (my favourite is section 6, although I'm
yet to beat factor(6)), manpage layout, and man(1) output font style
descend from the First Edition UNIX Programmer's Manual. These
conventions were cooked up by Ken Thompson, inspired by the Multics
MSPM, itself inspired by CTSS manuals.
- Robert Morris was supposedly involved in early roff work. The same
Robert Morris who later worked for the NSA. Could this be the REAL
OpenBSD FBI/NSA/aliens/Berlusconi backdoor? They can read your MANUALS,
man; your MANUALS.
Enjoy!
Kristaps
