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From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Unix and patent applications, ancient OS history
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 05:32:32 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:
> 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.

There was another killer app, which is not in Kernighan's book
on UNIX, but can be found on a Youtube video of a conference
discussions on the origins of UNIX.

The CEO of Bell was far-sighted, and for reasons of vanity did not
want to wear glasses when he gave speeches.  The UNIX system that
they had set up included a phototypesetter and the capability to
use larger letters, so he could read them.

That gave them a friend in very high places, helicopters picking
up speech manuscripts, highly confidential speeches on a machine
that very many people had dialup access to and, when this was
pointed out, a PDP-11 running UNIX with a phototypesetter in the
CEO's secretary's office.