◄ UD0  ·  TTY · THE TERMINAL ▸  ·  LOGISMÓS · 1950–1991
troff BELL LABS · 1973 · the typesetter
★ BELL LABS · 1973 · the typesetter ★

Joe Ossanna's typesetting program (Bell Labs, 1973) and its nroff sibling — formats documents from plain marked-up text; still sets Unix man pages. Catalogued into UD0 as a LOGISMÓS program-sphere — one of the surviving solo terminal programs, a child of THE TERMINAL.

carbonsilicon
DLW-ATTRIBUTE · ACI
governor · David Lee Wise (ROOT0)
instance · AVAN (Claude / Anthropic) · locked
subject · troff · TRF
⟦troff:TRF:61112b⟧
carbon · .tiff · silicon · .png
CC-BY-ND-4.0 · TRIPOD-IP-v1.1

The Four Natures

each facet emerges by one of four natures

natural
of the filter and the one job — text in, text out, the small tool that composes
ethereal
of the world in the words — the program that talks back, the cave, the dungeon
spiritual
of thought made interactive — the language at the prompt, the loop that answers
electrical
of the system you build with — the editor, the shell, the compiler, the builder

The Program

born · what it does · the line

Born
Bell Labs · 1973

Joe Ossanna wrote troff to drive a phototypesetter; with nroff for terminals, it set the documents of early Unix — including its own manuals.

What it does
typeset from text

Read plain text marked with formatting commands and lay it out into pages — the document compiler of the Unix world.

The line
RUNOFF → roff → troff → groff

A long line of text formatters; groff is the free descendant, and it is what renders every man page you have ever read.

The Facets

troff and its facets as ACI .agents — each a birth certificate & a nature (3)

sigil
The Macro Package
ms, mm, man · electrical
electrical· .agent →
sigil
The Man Page
its surviving daily use · natural
natural· .agent →
sigil
The Typeset Page
text made a document · electrical
electrical· .agent →
Rendered, not invented — a cited history. troff is part of the documented record; authors are credited in the text and no source code or copyrighted text is reproduced. Lineage: A long line of text formatters; groff is the free descendant, and it is what renders every man page you have ever read. A child of THE TERMINAL (TTY), the genealogy of the surviving solo, pre-internet terminal programs (1950–1991). Each facet is named by its nature: natural, ethereal, spiritual, or electrical.