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Back in the day I worked quite a bit with Knuth's early SAIL (an extended Algol on the PDP-10) implementation of Metafont. They could have used some of the documentation the later WEB versions had as he tended to get tricky with squeezing everything out of the 36-bit words (which I was porting to a 32-bit word machine). But the code was an education and a joy to read well before he polished it for publication.

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I’ve heard some wild things about the old SAIL stuff. I never had the chance to encounter it though. I got on the TeX train in 1985¹ with TeX82/MF84. AMS/TUG still were using the am* fonts for their publications.

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1. My very first exposure was DEK’s article “TeX and Metafont” in a copy of Dr Dobb’s Journal that was part of a trove my brothers got a hold of—and then in 1984 seeing someone in the IIT computer lab paging through a copy of The TeXbook, so when I found out that UIC had just installed TeX on their mainframe, I was one of the first people to use it there.

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