Re: 50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 21:47:14 -0700, The Real Bev wrote:

On 8/13/24 2:51 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:40:55 -0700, The Real Bev wrote:
 

A curious WP thing:  I temped for some title insurance people for a
few weeks. They had a system where knowledgeable people would fill in
(pencil) a template with codes indicating various descriptions etc.
for the drones to type in.  After a while I (a drone) realized that
the whole system was done with Word Perfect macro codes, a pretty
slick application.

 
So they were reinventing the kind of thing that typesetting markup
systems (troff/groff, TEX, SGML) have been doing for decades.

 
Possibly, but these were generating legal documents with a lot of
legalisms of various sorts and combinations, not just making pretty
documents.

One of the groundbreaking features of troff was its ability to do line
numbering -- rather important in legal documents such as patent
applications.

That was likely crucial in getting the Bell Labs crew the funding from the
higher-ups at AT&T to develop Unix.