I’ve been reading the 1977 Bell Labs Journal that collected everything written about UNIX up to that point. Seeing how much of its history was intimately tied to text processing and document layout was really mind-bending. I’d always assumed writing programs was Good Enough, but it was only once Unix started being used for real business at AT&T by laying out patent filing documentation that they got money for the PDP-11, which turned out to be a very important development.

It’s in reading that stuff that I grew To appreciate troff, nroff and the whole runoff family, and how CTSS was really astonishingly influential.