Annotated Unix Magic Poster

Somehow I had never heard of/seen this before. It looks like a prog rock album cover or something.

Some old commands in there I haven't used in a long time (poke, uucp), or never used - I think the troff I know is actually the one in GWBASIC (tracing off).

Much of the acceptance of UNIX at Bell Labs was due to its role as a typesetting system, with troff, eqn, and tbl commands. I worked for a UNIX support company (Interactive Systems Corporation) and our first customer was the U.S. Supreme Court because they deal with so many documents.

The TRS-80 has TROFF and TRON!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQoL_qpYbW0

More useful but not quite as magical as DECSYSTEM 10 and DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC's "LISTREVERSE" command!

https://web.archive.org/web/20210713130832/https://imgur.com...

Chalk one up for DEC and BASIC. What other programming languages support that feature, huh?

Now all you need is a COMEFROM and COMESUB and RUNREVERSE (or NUR) statements, and you can write reversible BASIC programs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World

    DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC User's Guide: LISTREVERSE command

    LISTREVERSE
    LISTNHREVERSE

    LISTREVERSE and LISTNHREVERSE print the contents of the
    user's memory area in order of descending line numbers. 
    LISTREVERSE precedes the output with a heading,
    LISTNHREVERSE eliminates the heading.

    LISTREVERSE

    EQUIV             10:53                      13-NOV-75

    40    END
    35    PRINT "THE EQUIVALENT CURRENT IS",I, " AMPERES"
    25    I=E1/R
    10    INPUT R
    5     INPUT E1

    READY

http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-1...

http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-2...

Emacs should have an edit-reverse-mode!

When I first started using Unix in school in the early 1980s, at least a third of the time was using nroff/troff, tbl and eqn. Maybe another 20% playing rogue. The rest was used to become a vi/ex advanced user, writing csh and awk scripts, and learning C.

The article mentions the "t" in troff, but doesn't mention that "roff" was short for "run off". I forget what the "n" was for.

"New" roff [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff

I liked Rocky Mountain BASIC with it's nice string operations and first class matrix operations.

I think it had a sort function too. But can't remember.