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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Unix and patent applications, ancient OS history
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 01:30:10 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>On Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:14 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:
>
>> Don't forget that the original use case for Unix was document
>> production, where record-based i/o is not very useful.
>
>Thinking of the kinds of documents: consider that, well into the 1980s and 
>1990s, sending out letters to mailing lists was a common scenario, and 
>that requires the ability to handle both text (the letter form) and 
>database (the address list) functions, and merge the two. ...

The killer app for Unix and nroff was typing up patent applications,
and the killer feature was putting line numbers every Nth line of the
formatted output the way the patent office wanted. At the time, it was
the only document system that could do that.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly