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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: 50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2024 05:41:15 -0000 (UTC)
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On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 21:47:14 -0700, The Real Bev wrote:

> On 8/13/24 2:51 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:40:55 -0700, The Real Bev wrote:
>> 
>>> A curious WP thing:  I temped for some title insurance people for a
>>> few weeks. They had a system where knowledgeable people would fill in
>>> (pencil) a template with codes indicating various descriptions etc.
>>> for the drones to type in.  After a while I (a drone) realized that
>>> the whole system was done with Word Perfect macro codes, a pretty
>>> slick application.
>> 
>> So they were reinventing the kind of thing that typesetting markup
>> systems (troff/groff, TEX, SGML) have been doing for decades.
> 
> Possibly, but these were generating legal documents with a lot of 
> legalisms of various sorts and combinations, not just making pretty 
> documents.

One of the groundbreaking features of troff was its ability to do line 
numbering -- rather important in legal documents such as patent 
applications.

That was likely crucial in getting the Bell Labs crew the funding from the 
higher-ups at AT&T to develop Unix.