Re: How Unix Spell Ran in 64kB RAM

On Fri, 24 Jan 2025 13:16:24 +0300, Anton Shepelev wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro:
 

Actually, no. Remember the addition of automatic line numbers to
troff was of great interest to AT&T’s legal department, which spent
a lot of time creating things like patent applications.

 
Sounds MSWord-ish to me.

There was no Microsoft at the time.

Line-numbering would seem to be implementable as an output-line trap
using a counter in a numeric register...

Testimony from those who were there
<https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Background.html>:

    When Unix was up and running on the PDP-11, Joe [Ossanna] got wind
    of the legal department having installed a commercial word
    processor. He went to pitch Unix as an alternative and clinched a
    trial by promising to make roff able to number lines by tomorrow
    in order to fulfill a patent-office requirement that the
    commercial system did not support.