[Simh] pdp11 and unix

[Rich Alderson]

> From: "Robert Thomas" <rft at asthomas.com>
> Date: Mon, 29 Feb 2016 12:37:19 -0500

> When I was in graduate school at Princeton in 1974, we used UNIX on a
> PDP-11/45 running Tex to typeset faculty papers, as well as writing compilers
> using lex and yacc and studying operating system and algorithm performance.
> Some graduate students over the summer ported UNIX to run on the IBM 370/195
> in a virtual machine.  There was a lot of activity going on that eventually
> escaped from academic labs into real commercial use.

Umm, no.  What you were using under Unix in 1974 would have been troff.

TeX was not invented until 1978.  It was written originally in SAIL on the
multiprocessor PDP-10 system at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
running the WAITS operating system (which diverged from the PDP-6/PDP-10
monitor c. 1971).  SAIL (the language) was also available under Tops-10 and
TOPS-20, but was restricted to the PDP-10 architecture.  Later it was
translated into Pascal.

A complete rewrite occurred in 1982, along with the creation of the WEB
literate programming system (Tangle, which creates unreadable Pascal code for
compilation, and Weave, which creates TeX code to document the program).  The
move to Unix (and elsewhere) came with the introduction of CWEB, which
generates C instead of Pascal.

                                                                Rich