DOCUMENT(ID:4591/doc003)

Beebe's text format system 


Nelson Beebe's document formatting system, similar (but developed independantly of) nroff

References:
  • Schwartz, Anita Z. (chair) "The TEX History Panel" TUGboat, Volume 22(3) 2001 — Proceedings of the 2001 Annual Meeting view details Abstract: from TEX history panel

    Nelson Beebe spoke about his original interest and involvement with TEX and how he got to know about it. His involvement with TEX began in the spring of 1979, when during a trip to the Bay Area, he was invited to Xerox PARC Laboratory to hear a talk given by Don Knuth on the new typesetting system, called TEX, that Don was working on. This was of immediate interest to him, because he had long been interested in software portability, and had long wanted to have portable documentation for software. In the mid-1970s, Nelson developed a prototype document formatting system, called DOCUMENT, with many similarities to UNIX nroff, although he had not heard of nroff at the time, since it too was under development. A check of Gehani’s book shows a report dated 1977 by Joseph Ossana "nroff/troff user's Manual", and a 1975 paper on eqn, so evidently nroff/troff goes back to at least about 1975.These were more ambitious thanDOCUMENT,having the advantage of a real typesetter, and the implementation language C, which did not become widely available outside Bell Labs until the early 1980s. [For portability reasons at the time, Nelson was restricted to Portable Fortran, and later, translated the code to a very nice structured Fortran preprocessor language,SF-TRAN3, developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.] When Nelson saw whatDon had done, he was very excited, because here was a vastly better system than anything he'd seen before, and furthermore, it ran on the same hardware that he used at Utah (aDEC-20 runningTOPS-20).Importantly, it could do mathematics! It wasn't long before Nelson fetched over Don’s early TEX ’78 distribution from Stanford and made early experiments with dot matrix printers (the Florida Data and thePrintronix) to see whether cheap draft output might be possible, because he could not findUS$20K to buy an early model laser printer from Imagen (a Stanford spin-off). He based his work on what Mark Senn had done (at Purdue) for the BBN BitGraph terminal, because he happened to have one.This work was later chronicled in a TUGboat paper [1]. It wasn't until 1984 that Nelson finally was able to geta real laser printer that could produce decent output. Nelson has been able to attend all but two of the annual TUG meetings, including the first one, and today, TEX is very much a part of his everyday life. External link: Online copy