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.

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.