Roff (computer program)

roff
Original author(s)	Ken Thompson
Developer(s)	AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial release	November 3, 1971;47 years ago
Operating system	Unix and Unix-like
Type	Command

Last updated April 21, 2019

roff was the first Unix text-formatting computer program, the most important application run on the first machine specifically purchased to run UNIX,^{[ citation needed ]} and a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing systems.

Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

A computer program is a collection of instructions that performs a specific task when executed by a computer. A computer requires programs to function.

Multics is an influential early time-sharing operating system which is based on the concept of a single-level memory. Virtually all modern operating systems were heavily influenced by Multics – often through Unix, which was created by some of the people who had worked on Multics – either directly or indirectly.

The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), was one of the first time-sharing operating systems; it was developed at the MIT Computation Center. CTSS was first demonstrated in 1961 and was operated at MIT until 1973. During part of this time, MIT's influential Project MAC also ran CTSS, but the system did not spread beyond these two sites.

History

The first UNIX version was a transliteration of the BCPL version of runoff into PDP-7 assembly, for the prototype UNIX on the PDP-7, circa 1970. When the first PDP-11 was acquired for UNIX in late 1970 (a PDP-11/20), the justification cited to management for the funding required was that it was to be used as a word processing system, and so roff was quickly transliterated again, into PDP-11 assembly, in 1971.

BCPL is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language. Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL, called B, was the language on which the C programming language was based. BCPL introduced several features of modern programming languages, including using curly braces to delimit code blocks and compilation via virtual machine byte code.

The PDP-7 was a minicomputer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation as part of the PDP series. Introduced in 1964, shipped since 1965, it was the first to use their Flip-Chip technology. With a cost of US$72,000, it was cheap but powerful by the standards of the time. The PDP-7 is the third of Digital's 18-bit machines, with essentially the same instruction set architecture as the PDP-4 and the PDP-9.

The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer ever.

roff printed the man pages for Versions 1 through 3 of Unix, and when the Bell Labs patent department began using it, it became the first Unix application with an outside client.^[1] Dennis Ritchie noted that the ability to rapidly modify roff (because it was locally written software) to provide special features was an important factor in leading to the adoption of UNIX by the patent department to fill its word processing needs. This in turn gave UNIX enough credibility inside Bell Labs to secure the funding to purchase one of the first PDP-11/45s produced.^{[ citation needed ]}

A man page is a form of software documentation usually found on a Unix or Unix-like operating system. Topics covered include computer programs, formal standards and conventions, and even abstract concepts. A user may invoke a man page by issuing the man command.

Nokia Bell Labs is an industrial research and scientific development company owned by Finnish company Nokia. Its headquarters are located in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Other laboratories are located around the world. Bell Labs has its origins in the complex past of the Bell System.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist, Computer Programmer and Mathematician. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B Programming Language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr(Short Term for his Full Name), His Net Worth was 1 Billion USD at the time of his Death.

Related Research Articles

Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist.

B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969. It is the work of Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie.

troff is the major component of a document processing system developed by AT&T Corporation for the Unix operating system.

<i>Lions Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code</i> book

Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) contains source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions Book. Despite its age, it is still considered an excellent commentary on simple but high quality code.

nroff is a text-formatting program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It produces output suitable for simple fixed-width printers and terminal windows. It is an integral part of the Unix help system, being used to format man pages for display.

Joseph F. Ossanna worked as a member of the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He became actively engaged in the software design of Multics, a general-purpose operating system used at Bell.

TYPSET was a document editor that was used with the 1964-released RUNOFF program, one of the earliest text formatting programs to see significant use.

Coherent is a clone of the Unix operating system for IBM PC compatibles and other microcomputers, developed and sold by the now-defunct Mark Williams Company (MWC). Historically, the operating system was a proprietary product, but it became open source in 2015, released under a 3-clause BSD License.

Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T Corporation in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.

Jerome Howard "Jerry" Saltzer is a computer scientist.

The Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX) is an early, now discontinued, version of the Unix operating system created in the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Group of AT&T. Its stated goal was to provide a time-sharing working environment for large groups of programmers, writing software for larger batch processing computers.

Part of the troff suite of Unix document layout tools, tbl is a preprocessor that formats tables in preparation for processing with troff/nroff.

The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems.

Research Unix refers to early versions of the Unix operating system for DEC PDP-7, PDP-11, VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center.

Groff is a typesetting system that creates formatted output when given plain text mixed with formatting commands. It is the GNU replacement for the troff and nroff text formatters.

refer is a program for managing bibliographic references, and citing them in troff documents. It is implemented as a troff preprocessor.

Ken Thompson American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

Kenneth Lane Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.

Lorinda Cherry is a computer programmer. She received her Masters in computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1969. She joined Bell Labs in 1972 as an assembly language programmer, and worked there on the Unix operating system for several years.

References

↑ McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139.

Sources

D. M. Ritchie, The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing System (AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, Vol. 63, No. 8, October 1984)

External links

roff - Concepts and history of roff typesetting

This digital typography article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[reader-1] McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139.