Re: Unix and patent applications, ancient OS history

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:14 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:
>

Don't forget that the original use case for Unix was document
production, where record-based i/o is not very useful.

>
Thinking of the kinds of documents: consider that, well into the 1980s and
1990s, sending out letters to mailing lists was a common scenario, and
that requires the ability to handle both text (the letter form) and
database (the address list) functions, and merge the two. ...

The killer app for Unix and nroff was typing up patent applications,
and the killer feature was putting line numbers every Nth line of the
formatted output the way the patent office wanted. At the time, it was
the only document system that could do that.

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