I was telling a story about my first job a couple of days ago. I was an ‘applications programmer’ at Cambridgeshire College of Art and Technology. There was an Argentinian lecturer who knew our systems. He asked if his wife could use the computer centre facilities to write up her research thesis during the Summer holidays. We were casual users of a text processing ‘tagging language’ for documentation. It was called DSR, Digital [Equipment Co.] Standard Runoff, so my colleague John suggested she used that. The ‘typing department’ had some fancy new ‘word processors’ (I think they were Wang) but we didn’t have any authority over them and wouldn’t be able to help her with problems. We also had doubts about whether they had the capacity for a whole thesis.
So it was that John and, in his absence, I provided occasional help to a charming, intelligent Argentinian woman during the outbreak of the Falklands War in 1982, while the British press ramped up the hatred of British idiots against the entire Argentinian nation. She was the first Argentinian I’d ever met and it was the first time I had any indication that fascism could also infect the UK or was personally shamed by the state of our newspapers. I remember us scooping up some hate-filled tabloid front page and dumping it, seconds before our guest arrived.
In later jobs I learned of Unix roff, nroff and troff and came to assume that Runoff was DEC’s version of the Unix tools. Today I discovered that isn’t true. DEC’s Runoff came from the common ancestor of the Unix tools, Runoff on CTSS then Multics (1964.)
“types out text segments in manuscript form.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF
CTSS was also the original home of LISP, ALGOL and the text editor QED, the predecessor of ed, vi and vim.
On The Outside 