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19-419: Of two earlier print/formatting programs DITTO and TJ-2 , only the latter had, and introduced, text justification ; RUNOFF also added pagination . The name RUNOFF, and similar names led to other formatting program implementations. By 1982, Runoff (a name not possible before lowercase letters were introduced to filenames) largely became associated with Digital Equipment Corporation and Unix computers. DEC used

38-591: A computer in planning for the event. Despite missing out on the then fastest time, Samson's attempt was to act as the inspiration for many similar subway racing attempts. Samson appears in the Computer History Museum Mouse That Roared panel discussion recorded in May 2006 to celebrate the restoration of a PDP-1. For the restoration project he reverse-engineered music tapes from the PDP-1 era and built

57-497: Is a direct predecessor of the runoff document formatting program of Multics , which in turn was the ancestor of the roff and nroff document formatting programs of Unix , and their descendants. It was also the ancestor of FORMAT for the IBM System/360 , and of course indirectly of every computerized word processing system. Likewise, RUNOFF for CTSS was the predecessor of the various RUNOFFs for DEC 's operating systems, via

76-643: Is thought to be the first page layout program. Although it lacks page numbering , page headers and footers , TJ-2 is the first word processor to provide a number of essential typographic alignment and automatic typesetting features: Developed from two earlier Samson programs, Justify and TJ-1, TJ-2 was written for the PDP-1 that was donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 by Digital Equipment Corporation . Taking English text as input, TJ-2 aligns left and right margins, justifying

95-605: The CTSS operating system. TYPSET and RUNOFF soon evolved into runoff for Multics , which was in turn ported to Unix in the 1970s as roff . A similar program for the ITS PDP-6 and later the PDP-10 was TJ6 . Peter Samson Peter R. Samson (born 1941 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts ) is an American computer scientist , best known for creating pioneering computer software for

114-516: The EDT text editor under the VS/9 operating system . These different releases of Runoff typically had little in common except the convention of indicating a command to Runoff by beginning the line with a period. The origin of IBM's SCRIPT software began in 1968 when IBM contracted Stuart Madnick of MIT to write a simple document preparation tool for CP/67 , which he modelled on MIT 's CTSS RUNOFF. RUNOFF

133-580: The Expensive Planetarium star display for Spacewar! . Also for the PDP-1 he wrote TJ-2 (Type Justifying Program), the predecessor of the troff and nroff page layout programs developed at Bell Labs, a War card game, and, with Alan Kotok , T-Square , a drafting program that used a Spacewar! controller for an input device. Samson was a contributing architect to the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-6 , and wrote

152-491: The IBM 704 , but frustration with the high level of security around the machine. Only those with very high clearance were able to actually handle the computer, with all programs submitted to be processed through the machine by someone else. This meant Samson would not find out the results of his programs until a few days after submitting them. Because of these restrictions to the IBM 704, it

171-590: The RUNOFF developed by the University of California, Berkeley 's Project Genie for the SDS 940 system. The name is alleged to have come from the phrase at the time, I'll run off a copy . TYPESET contains features inspired by a variety of other programs including Colossal Typewriter and Expensive Typewriter . Input: Output: TJ-2 TJ-2 ( Type Justifying Program ) was published by Peter Samson in May 1963 and

190-707: The TX-0 and PDP-1. Samson studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) between 1958 and 1963. He wrote, with characteristic wit, the first editions of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) dictionary, a predecessor to the Jargon File . He appears in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy . As a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club in his student days at MIT , Samson

209-658: The central memory subsystem for the ILLIAC IV supercomputer complex at the NASA Ames Research Center . At Autodesk , he contributed to rendering, animation, Web browsing, and scripting languages. He received U.S. patents in software anti-piracy and virtual reality . In 1966 Samson attempted to ride all lines of the New York City Subway in the shortest possible time. True to the MIT hacker culture he enlisted

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228-673: The machine's first Fortran compiler , for Fortran II. At Systems Concepts , he programmed the first Chinese-character digital communication system, while he was director of marketing and director of program development. Samson designed the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer. Built at Systems Concepts, for ten years it was the primary engine for the computer music group at Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Samson oversaw manufacturing and engineering for hardware, including

247-403: The output using white space and word hyphenation. Text is marked-up with single lowercase characters combined with the PDP-1's overline character, carriage returns, and internal concise codes. The computer's six toggle switches control the input and output devices, enable and disable hyphenation and stop the session. Words can be hyphenated with a light pen on the computer's CRT display and from

266-403: The session's dictionary in memory. On-screen hyphenation has SAVE and FORGET commands and OOPS , the undo . Comments in the code were quoted thirty years later: "The ways of God are just and can be justified to man" and "Girls who wear pants should be sure that the end justifies the jeans." TJ-2 was succeeded by TYPSET and RUNOFF , a pair of complementary programs written in 1964 for

285-614: The terms VAX DSR and DSR to refer to VAX DIGITAL Standard Runoff . The original RUNOFF type-setting program for CTSS was written by Jerome H. Saltzer circa 1964. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy translated that from MAD to BCPL . Morris and McIlroy then moved the BCPL version to Multics when the IBM 7094 on which CTSS ran was being shut down. Documentation for the Multics version of RUNOFF described it as "types out text segments in manuscript form." A later version of runoff for Multics

304-663: Was not until Samson was introduced to the TX-0 that he could explore his obsession with computer programming, as members of the Railroad Club were able to access the computer directly without having to go through a superior. Working with Jack Dennis on the TX-0 at MIT Building 26, he developed an interest in computing waveforms to synthesize music. For the PDP-1 he wrote the Harmony Compiler with which PDP-1 users coded music. He wrote

323-517: Was noted for his contributions to the Signals and Power Subcommittee, the technical side of the club. Steven Levy 's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution outlines Samson's interest in trains and electronics, and his influence in the club. Levy explains how the club was in fact Samson's gateway into hacking and his ability to manipulate electronics and machine code to create programs . Levy explains how Samson discovered his programming passion with

342-515: Was written in PL/I by Dennis Capps, in 1974. This runoff code was the ancestor of roff that was written for the fledgling Unix in assembly language by Ken Thompson . Other versions of Runoff were developed for various computer systems including Digital Equipment Corporation 's PDP-11 minicomputer systems running RT-11 , RSTS/E , RSX on Digital's PDP-10 and for OpenVMS on VAX minicomputers, as well as UNIVAC Series 90 mainframes using

361-475: Was written in 1964 for the CTSS operating system by Jerome H. Saltzer in MAD and FAP . It actually consisted of a pair of programs, TYPSET (which was basically a document editor), and RUNOFF (the output processor). RUNOFF had support for pagination and headers, as well as text justification ( TJ-2 appears to have been the earliest text justification system, but it did not have the other capabilities). RUNOFF

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