Re: Unix and patent applications, ancient OS history

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:

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.

There was another killer app, which is not in Kernighan's book
on UNIX, but can be found on a Youtube video of a conference
discussions on the origins of UNIX.

The CEO of Bell was far-sighted, and for reasons of vanity did not
want to wear glasses when he gave speeches.  The UNIX system that
they had set up included a phototypesetter and the capability to
use larger letters, so he could read them.

That gave them a friend in very high places, helicopters picking
up speech manuscripts, highly confidential speeches on a machine
that very many people had dialup access to and, when this was
pointed out, a PDP-11 running UNIX with a phototypesetter in the
CEO's secretary's office.