From: ldo@nz.invalid   
      
   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.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)