wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld) (06/06/88)
I forwarded Skip Egdorf's message to Jerry Saltzer (currently, he's the technical director of Project Athena, and he has better things to do than read netnews..). Here is his reply: Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 01:34:13 EDT To: Bill Sommerfeld <wesommer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> Subject: re: Seen on comp.arch From: Jerome H. Saltzer <Saltzer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> Bill, Thanks for the comp.arch item. > Actually, TOPS-10 RUNOFF and Unix's ROFF are both siblings on the family > tree of the MIT roff program by J. Saltzer. Well, his archeology is only fair. My original program, on CTSS, was named runoff, not roff. Its birthdate is 1963. The guys at BTL renamed it roff when then transcribed it to the GE-635 on its way to UNIX. > Also of like age is vi / ex / ed / qed ... back to where early > teco split from the same family, leading to ITS teco, leading > to emacs... That tree goes back to CTSS typset, the companion for runoff, which I wrote at the same time. Someday I ought to write an historical paper on this stuff. At the time, 25 years ago, it didn't seem significant enough for a paper. Jerry