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

Johanne Fairchild <jfairchild@tudado.org> wrote:

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

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.

 
Thanks for sharing that.  Can you give me a historical reference about
that?  I'd like to read it.  Thank you!

Search for "patent" in these two pages, you'll get some info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-strange-birth-and-long-life-of-unix

Feel free to also read the remainder of each if you so choose.