[melbourne-pug] finding an internship

[Sam Watkins]

> I'm sad to say I've never heard of "roff" format

.TH TROFF 1
.SH NAME
troff, nroff, dpost \- text formatting and typesetting

"roff was the first Unix text-formatting computer program, the most
important application run on the first machine specifically purchased to
run UNIX, and a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing
systems.  It was a Unix version of the runoff text-formatting program
from Multics, which was a descendant of RUNOFF for CTSS (the first
computerized text-formatting application).  The first UNIX version was a
transliteration of the BCPL version of runoff into PDP-7 assembly, for
the prototype UNIX on the PDP-7, circa 1970. When the first PDP-11 was
acquired for UNIX in late 1970 (a PDP-11/20), the justification cited to
management for the funding required was that it was to be used as a word
processing system, and so roff was quickly transliterated again, into
PDP-11 assembly, in 1971.  Dennis Ritchie notes that the ability to
rapidly modify roff (because it was locally written software) to provide
special features needed by the Bell Labs Patent department was an
important factor in leading to the adoption of UNIX by the Patent
department to fill their word processing needs. This in turn gave UNIX
enough credibility inside Bell Labs to secure the funding to purchase
one of the first PDP-11/45s produced; it was on that machine that UNIX
evolved into the system that later took the computer science world by
storm."

publications that use troff -
  http://www.troff.org/pubs.html

(not many compared to TeX!
 but also all of the UNIX, Linux and Plan 9 manual pages)