From: rich@example.invalid   
      
   Johanne Fairchild  wrote:   
   > Lawrence D'Oliveiro  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  Can you give me a historical reference about   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.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)